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Rareș-Ionuț Felindean, 17 years old, is participating in the 6th International Literary Creation Competition, from Cluj-Napoca, Romania. We are grateful for the participation and wish him success.

   A Thief (YHWH)

  Three septillion, nine-hundred thirty eight quintillion, fifty-seven billion and one hundred two million years. The blistering fire rends my flesh, and the stone mallet bashes in my skull every fourteen seconds. Fourteen seconds which I've come to realize are a simple, unchanging constant of reality and infinity itself. Scarlet blood gushes out of my millon pored face with each swing of the fatal weapon. In those fourteen seconds, my only companion, daresay unlikely friend of my existence is the mallet-wielder; A horned coagulate of shadows, and what I can only describe, after long and arduous contemplation, as justice incarnate. He is my eternal executioner, just in his strike against myself. It never strikes from the same angle or direction, even if these two concepts became meaningless for me long ago.

  The three-foot mallet swims through my friend as if it were a ravenous shark, striking my fragile body and ending my life, crushing my head against the hot ground below. A few seconds pass and I'm anew. One would hope that in the torment I exist in, the horrors of thought and remebrance wouldn't affect me. Sadly, my flesh was cursed from the very beginning, and each fiber of my body remembers everything. I have not forgotten yet a single passing moment. Each fatal strike brings me complex new feelings, and a pain I can never accustom to. In truth, he never hits me the same way - the blood always splatters differently, and the time it takes for me to perish always differs. Sometimes, the light in my eyes extinguishes instantly. Sometimes, it takes a few seconds, and rarely, the fire is the executioner, the one that claims my body.

  After a few hundred years, I've managed to entirely memorise one of the darkened chamber walls, recreating it perfectly and without flaw in my mind. The cracks never widen and the mortar never chips off between deaths, which makes it easier to do so. After I memorized the entire chamber, I began cataloguing the pores of my skin, the fibres in my hair, and once I could exist within my mind as I exist within the flesh, graduating to the remembrance of more complex matters simply made sense. The annals of my mind house insurmountable mounds of personal (and mostly, impersonal) existence, through which I have lived as kings and queens, as diplomats and rebels, as specks of stone and as the dust of stars clouding the night skies. Renegades and bastards, lowly flies and mighty boars, a familiar picture in Venice and a particle buzzing in the Sun; each one was I and I was them, and then they were themselves. In my fourteen-second fragments of life, my mind had given birth to life unbridled, for thought is no less of a mother to reality than a farm cow is to its suckling calves. Unbeknownst to my friend and to the chamber walls, the creases of my brain had housed more than one could ever imagine. The curse of memory plaguing me had turned into my biggest asset, and these worlds I had shapen could exist for entire eons before the mallet would strike and the process of creation would begin anew. Truthfully, one of the things I have never been able to muster was my name, and soon I had begun taking on existence through what my mind endlessly conjured. You cannot evoke something without paying tribute to everything that ever was - and will be - and as such, the identity I materialize changes every time, but fundamentally remains the same.

  Now, as I begin to feel the air moved by the swing of the mallet, and my charred body braces for impact, I reflect on the world I birth in the last twelve seconds. It's not unlike the ones before, and it will be just as similar to the ones after it. But in the end, even if this world is I and everything else that could ever exist, I have realized it truly is ever so slightly different; In this world I was God, and I await to see what face of the same endless shape I will be next.