Apeiron Review | Issue 18

Page 48

Radioactive Isotopes Robert Hilles

The imagination is binary and contains slippage. Is more of an ascent than descent. Radioactive Isotopes in a garden. It is safe to say that radiation is outside human control. It can’t be contained and once it all goes wrong the amount of time to dissipate it is beyond any livable scale. The universe is so vast it appears to be standing still but it is not. Our years are spent inside closed heads where time ticks in seconds. Radioactive Isotopes prove there is no God nor is all that is produced pluggable into a moral matrix. There is no such weighting. Before the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl there was always going to be that disaster because isotopes are not bound by hope or wishes or even by the laws of thermal dynamics. That is but a mathematical wish waiting to be corrected or at best deciphered and once deciphered it is no longer a wish but the way through the wrong door. It can be spread out then and drifts far out into the future. You enter an airplane and fly over the abandoned city of Pripyat and you see a stopped Ferris wheel and rows of apartment buildings and the swallowing green. In another few decades the city and Chernobyl will be mostly hidden by a vibrant forest and from above like now it will look as though no one ever lived there. Only the remaining stacks will contradict that notion. If you look closely enough you will see the downward slope of history. And in a hundred years who will tell the story? And in a thousand who?

48


Articles inside

Evening Rituals

8min
pages 60-67

The Stipple Ceiling

1min
page 59

The Suicide Man

10min
pages 52-58

Message: Undeliverable

1min
page 51

Hallows Eve

1min
page 50

The Last Honest Man

1min
page 49

The Healing

5min
pages 42-47

Radioactive Isotopes

1min
page 48

Quartet for Nina and Sam

1min
page 39

Faustus Hood

3min
pages 40-41

The Future in Repose

1min
page 38

Men Have Come with Arms

1min
page 37

Aspiration, n.2

1min
page 36

The Last Minstrel Show

5min
pages 30-32

Rip

1min
page 33

Dance Music

2min
pages 34-35

The Old Greeting Card

3min
pages 26-27

Apologia for Missing Church Sundays

1min
page 23

Morning Rituals

1min
page 7

Fire Ants

11min
pages 10-14

Your Ambitious Day for Fishing

1min
page 22

Cuttlefish

1min
page 15

Relations

1min
pages 19-20

Rats

1min
page 16

Interstices

1min
page 17

Deadheading

1min
page 9
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