The End Is Now

You’d probably be surprised I ended up here, fucked up in this very specific way, but then, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Things happen. Maybe I’d be surprised about where you ended up, too. I doubt it, but see me politely trying to give you the benefit of the doubt—one of those things you thought I was incapable of? Things happen; people—at least those of us who venture out of our basement every once in a while—change. Here’s me, since the days of you: Austin, then LA, then back into the nation’s beer belly, even if it was a little too close to home, hop-skip-jumping through crap towns on I-70, six months waiting tables for truckers feeling like I was on one of those serial killer shows waiting for my big scene as a dumpster corpse, desert then mountains then plains, and everywhere I stopped, everyone I stopped for, promised me I’d be stopping forever. Remember when I popped your cherry and you told me you were going to chain me to the bed and keep me as your prisoner until I got old and wrinkled and ready to trade in for a new model? The pillow talk got better, but the men didn’t, and none of them kept me anymore than you did. Maybe people don’t change so much after all. (I’ve changed, you said, but it was only because I changed you, and if that skank you tutored wanted to fuck you, it was only because I made you throw out those orange clogs and stop whispering to yourself when you thought no one was looking.) To wrap this up: I came, they came, then they left. Until I threw in with the Children of Abraham, because Father Abraham said God would never leave me—but then Father Abraham left, and the fucking world ended, on exactly the day he predicted it would—so where does that leave me?

Here, in the Ark, locked up safe and sound in a mountain compound with Abraham’s kid and all of us who were fucked up enough to believe him when he and his dad said the end was nigh. The world left us, but we clued in and left it first. Followed that kid up a mountain, barricaded ourselves behind sheet metal and barbed-wire, waited for God’s wrath and wondered what form it would take. No shock he took us out just like he did the dinosaurs. There’s nothing much to read up here but the Bible, and I’ve read enough to know God likes repeating himself. He likes to smite, and very occasionally, he likes to save. I guess he must like us—the reformed hookers and crack addicts and embezzlers and sad sacks on the run from bad memories and worse husbands—because we’re the ones still here. You were always so pleased with yourself about your lack of fucked-up-edness. I would say look where it’s gotten you, but you wouldn’t exactly hear it, would you, because that’s the whole point of where it’s gotten you. Out in the world with the rest of the assholes, minding your non-fucked-up business when the shit came down. Isaac says we should imagine a happy and peaceful end for all the poor souls caught unaware. An aneurysm at the moment the sky exploded. Swift, unbloodied obliteration.

I would prefer not to.