This crazy preacher from Oakland—where there is no there. For weeks we laugh about it. Worry on facebook and twitter, plan parties for when all these meddlesome Christians will finally be taken away from us. The day breaks sunny and alive and we look nervously over our shoulders for any sign that we may have been wrong to laugh, that maybe we’d like to be sucked up into heaven too. The appointed hour arrives in the central time-zone, apocalypse taking his time. The sky explodes with lightning and hail like baseballs screams to the ground at the speed of gravity. But we need not be afraid.
The world actually ended forty years ago yesterday. After a physicist at the University of Michigan theorized that he could create a black hole. He couldn’t, but he did unleash a fireball that raced through the air, consuming everything it touched. And there was no god to save us, no god to gather us up, no god to show us to paradise, as we burned away. The earth, now a cold dead thing, orbits the sun as it always has. The sun not knowing or caring that we’re not around to worship it anymore. But the moon. The moon with her full bright face. She misses us terribly, weeps over the empty oceans and scorched plains. And every night when she goes to sleep she dreams of us. In this way we live on. Until the sun finally has enough of that sad noise and expands out to heliopause, swallowing her and us and everything else finally away.
One Comment