Was Man Being God What Brought the End

Past the entranceway, a cold wind shudders. It is wrapped in midday and draped in condensation; it sticks to our skin and whispers in past tense verbs. It conjugates our hands in "could have beens,"and "should have dones." It is auburn and hungry, it is a breeze in girl's clothing. It smells of vanilla and it whispers like penstrokes on notebook paper. On our stoop stands an angel - or maybe it's just the neighbor girl - bathed in the morning sun. She wears a halo of pink and violet dawn, it stretches from the roots of her hair to the curve of the sky. She wears her mother's white linen robe, she stands barefoot and broken by her father's fists. In her eyes lie the bottom of the sea. You could drown trying to reach into them.

She speaks in ember tongues and her words are smoke.

"God is coming, shake your fists and flash your teeth."

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The world was over long before Jesus came back. The streets were long and hollow, while along the avenues the blank stares of a thousand empty faces fell longingly upon each other. Their fingers still clutched their children, some still had cigarettes pressed to their lips. But the road told their story in blood, as it chased itself sideways from gutter to gutter. It happened at night. And it wasn't the climate, or the inevitability of continental drift, or the stock market. It didn't matter how many hybrids we drove, or how often we took our recycling to the curb. In the end, it came down to humans being humans. The president on the airwaves saying "My fellow Americans," or the thin voices on the telephone telling us not to leave our houses, the faint sounds of the helicopter behind the reporter saying that the interstate was on fire, that nobody could move. The children congregated in droves to the windows, they laughed as they pointed at the glowing lines etching death across the sky, they said "Look, mommy, look at the fireworks." We looked behind us as we ran, at the Great Nation of Salt. The sway of the flames that silhouetted the skyline lit our path, guided our feet to the plains. The whole time we ran, we could hear the gunfire, the crackle on the radios. Most of the ones that lived could recall the look of fear in the soldier's eye, or the plumes of smoke that held up the sky.

No, when Jesus arrived, it was just a kick to the teeth.

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Shall we away, my darling, back to the purple mountains? Lie down to sleep upon the fruited plain, be made to gaze upon the shudder of the stars? Break the screen with our fists, dance like savages around glowing embers of product reports, spreadsheets and eviction notices? Shall we form great herds and roam the prairies, shall we hold hands and line the coast and hail the coming dawn? Shall we eat from the land, write great fiction on the shore, pass legend and lore from father to son and swear on a bible of sand that from this day forward we shall be human, and no more? Shall we stand on the rooftops with fingers outstretched, say to one another "This is where I grew up, in the burned out shell of a church," or point at the sky and tell our babies that "That is the hole from when Jesus came back, fire-eyed and steel?" Shall we name our children after rivers, Potomac and Hudson and Mississippi, shall we rock them to sleep in our own two arms? Shall we teach them to read and write and sing? Shall we read and write and sing to them? Shall we cure their attention deficiencies with eyes and mouths and open hands?

Shall we wake up, kicking and screaming?