epitaph

The prophecy isn't so much in the reveal but in the preparation. The tuning of the language until almost everything suggests the outcome. Shoving that sword into the stone. Play your cards just right, leave enough between the lines and just out of the shot, and your genius will continue to sing through the ages. Play your cards right, and two thousand years from now someone will be using some off-hand remark you recorded as evidence against the marriages of couples you don't even know.

The sky that tumbles, the savage turn the weather brings. We can blame it on the gays, we can blame it on the unbelievers. We can say that the devil bade it done. Count it as proof of the changing climate, count it as proof of the end of the world. The heavens boil and the very air is made of wrath and ruin. Never mind the wounds, never mind the mortal cost. Someone somewhere has to say "I told you so."

There are worlds that end in fire, there are worlds that end in ice. Some worlds end without that tell-tale bang, whimpering all the way to oblivion. We lean upon our poets and our prophets to tell us just how bad tomorrow will be. Science can tell us that our world will be engulfed by the swellings of our sun, spent of fuel in four or five billion years. Whether the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way before this happened depends on who you ask, but I would venture that either way, human beings will have long since past from the earth. Our stories long since lost to some set of horrors or conflagrations, our future long since buried in the past.