This is not what the prognosticators had in mind. The scorched beauty. The soft silence. The soaking it in with wonder and trepidation of a child in an experienced frame, experience that is now meaningless.

Yes, these barren, meandering paths are on simmer. Ominous smoke-steam rising hints that a shift to boil is coming. The chaotic-mute landscape reveals what’s left of a wooden-handled screwdriver,
a high heel-less shoe with no companion, a large, threadbare coat button, an empty and soiled snack-size bag of chips—a collage of misfit mediums on a thick canvas of ash.

In the distance, we hear crickets rolling up in their makeshift wheelchairs, novices learning to play tiny violins. Surely they don’t know the murder ballads or a single funeral march. How could they with their repertoire amputated, all but erased? Yet from a distance, it sounds as if they are composing a gorgeous hymn for the end of the world.

*

© by Thad DeVassie. Used by permission of the author.