3:42 p.m. A Creation Myth

A Black Hole in Medusa's Hair: A galaxy lies about 110 million light years away.

If a black hole could slowly reverse itself and regurgitate the swirling bits of cosmic dust and dirt into a sucking, cyclonic universal current, the world would be born and eventually so would we. The particles you couldn't see or know would fly together — circling with the force of storms that sink ships and the chancing purpose of a tornado that gently hurls a golden retriever from his master and safely plants him, 200 miles away, on sunny hunting grounds. At some point, the winds would die down, and the prehistoric atoms would dance like jumping beetles, crashing into one another until their atomic hearts exploded, and with their insides joined, they'd create something newer than themselves. These heart-wrenching explosions would continue until the living bits you could see only with the help of a microscope turned into living bits you could see with your naked eye, and soon they'd be living organisms that you could hold and feel the weight of. They'd turn into families and orders and phylums and kingdoms bigger than family trees; vaster than that black hole (if it had the foresight) had ever imagined. So when your mother tells you that you came to be by winning a baby running race in Heaven, you can look in the backyard at that 1000-year-old tree of particles — of space and time and black and history and prehistoric atoms — and know that something doesn't feel quite right.