A Local TV Weatherman Describes the Apocalypse
So as we look at this, we can expect something like a wound
made of fire opening in the sky around this rotation here.
Already a falling of frogs has begun to fill local lawns
and parking lots in Fredericksburg, clogging gutters and ditches.
And to the southeast of Adams County, the dead
are beginning to walk again. And you see this red blob
to the east of Cleves? We have no idea what that is, but it appears
to be erasing all forms of matter, leaving behind nameless voids,
locals who’ve looked into them report seeing a nothingness of being
that filled them with an unshakeable dread, comparable to
a horrible nightmare from which they can never awake.
Now there’s also talk of angels touching down in the woods and fields
around Elizabethtown, so you’ll want to avoid those areas
where you can, unless you want the wrath of their light
to dry all your fluids and reduce you to a powder made up
of only your most base elements. And while it’s the middle
of the day, a starless blackness like the dark of night has
descended upon the tri-county area here, and the fabric of time
itself has begun to tear and collapse, to the point
that, as I stand before you now, viewers, I’m also
standing again, as a child, in my mother’s kitchen.
She’s alive once more and handing me a plate
of graham crackers and a glass of chocolate milk,
the way she used to every day when I’d come home
from school. Viewers, I don’t know if you can see now
the tears flooding my face as if my eyes were storm clouds.
She’s telling me this is the end. Go not to your houses of worship.
Go instead to those you love who love you most, for if God
is anywhere, He is there. She’s leaving now. In this kitchen
that I never knew was infinite, all color is fading.
Mother, wait. Viewers, there’s a gate she’s walking through
made of smokeless flame and shadowless light. As I look
into it, viewers, for the first time in a long time, I feel
the dissolution of a loneliness that’s lived for years within me.
I must decide now if I will follow. Otherwise, we can expect
a slight chance of showers heading into our weekend,
but by Wednesday, we’re going to see a significant dip
in temperatures, it’ll be a good opportunity to get outside
and get some of that end-of-summer landscaping finished.
If we should come back from this sponsor break,
Chad Lewis will be here to bring you the latest
in sports this week. I’m Jeff Mann with Metro Weather.
Mother, don’t go. I don’t want this painlessness to end.
I can feel my body diffusing into metaphysical residue. Oh,
the beauty I’m becoming now, it’s almost unendurable.
Monsters of the Midwest
Most live in the woods, as you’d expect,
but some prefer more urban dwellings,
the basement of an abandoned mall,
while others build makeshift caves in junkyards.
They used to fly, blocking out the sun like storm clouds,
beating thunderous across the sky,
stirring up winds that could bend trees,
but now they’re too heavy for their wings.
They found diving into fast food dumpsters
was easier than snatching up children or small adults.
They struggle to get around on foot, stumbling,
their underdeveloped wings twitching like cows’ ears.
Some have their horns removed
like wisdom teeth when they reach adolescence
so they can rest their heads more easily
on the couches they steal from yard sales.
They hide these couches in the woods
and lounge on them around the fire at night,
passing warm, flat Mountain Dew
back and forth in jugs, like mead,
complaining about their aching joints
that groan like winter branches,
scratching their bellies desperately as they would
at the doors that could somehow lead
to a world in which they’re at least
a shadow of what they used to be,
until occasionally, a camper, lost and starving,
too weak to sneak away,
will come stumbling through the brush,
and they’ll all look at each other inquisitively,
like, “Should we eat this one?”
then the largest of them will stand,
brush the potato chip crumbs off his slimy chest,
lick his greasy lips and say, “Why not?”
Time Capsule
I found a blue pill on the sidewalk and held it,
lighter, it seemed, than the sunlight in my hand beside it.
Somehow, though, I felt the breadth of a planet in my palm.
Before I had the chance to change my mind,
I swallowed it, and didn’t think, choosing instead
to walk on to the store, but I found the sun moved
backward as I breathed in, forward as I breathed out.
I coughed, and the day turned to twilight.
I looked at the sun and sneezed, and the town went to sleep.
Then I took the deepest breath I could. And held it:
I was back to the day my oldest son was born, back
to the day I didn’t know what it meant to live
for someone other than myself. I held it as long as I could,
but had to let it go, and came back to the present.
In the store, I kept breathing, and people would take
a few steps back as I’d inhale, a few steps forward
as I exhaled. I saw Kyle with his kids in the cereal aisle.
He waved. I waved back with my right hand, but as I did,
all of time went backwards. I waved harder, faster,
and watched the store being emptied, deconstructed.
I went outside and waved more, watched as the sun strobed
to days and weeks past. I shrank trees and tumors,
brought the dead back to life, undid the damage
of storms and men, sent bombs back to the skies,
reduced flames to sparks. The world got darker,
less populated. The pavement beneath my feet faded
to soil. The sky changed, the roads grew over.
People rode horses backwards across the plains and forests.
Old gods poured from the earth in red-hot muck.
The stars grew brighter, and the void between stars
filled with flecks of undead light.
I stood robed in centuries, in cures and sicknesses
yet unknown to the world in which I stood.
Then I waved my left hand, bringing all of it back,
relived the funerals of forests and fathers, faltered
through roads being rebuilt, breathed in the machineries,
until it was, again, a slow Sunday afternoon in June.
I could’ve waved my left hand more, moved past my life,
seen what the world will do to us, what we will do to it,
and how many veils we’ll lay across our visions of the past,
whether or not they’ll be thin enough to see through. Instead
I walked home, my bags in tow, letting the pill dissolve
in my veins like a star in the morning. I walked
through the back door where my kids greeted me.
They waved. I waved back and breathed and waited
for nothing. For now.
“A Local TV Weatherman Describes the Apocalypse,” was originally published Strange Horizons