The Last Minute

            This dawn has no feelings.  No end.  It has beginnings tangled up in years and months of subtlety, of decisions taken without foreseeing this moment.  Because, if any human eye could have seen it, could have believed in seeing it, how could they not have turned away?

            And yet.

            Images of placards, and shouting, and warnings.  My own sister there.  Her hair in two braids, daisies woven into them, a huge, flopping cardboard sign in her hands.  Thump – against the windscreen of a departing car.  WAR IS STUPID.  STOP THE INSANITY.

            We should have known how stupid.

            Could we really not see how insane?  How MAD?

            Collectively, all of us: authors of this.  Its architects.  Twenty million baby steps and here they are, culminating here, in this moment, this journey, in this.  In this!

            The sky boils.  There won’t be words to capture it.  There won’t be poetry to describe the colour between green and blue, a backlit azure, painted thinly with fading night, the shadow of violet that overlays it.  And then the sky burns.  Colours of autumn and ash – reds and golds and greens and bright-white; these blast through the atmosphere, a wave of them, unrolling over the sky.  Crashing and crashing and crashing.  The naked heavens revealed.

            Whose fingers are going to be left to paint it?  Whose pencil would capture the intensity in the air, the prickling, the boom that follows the light?

            “Come to the window,” I can only whisper the words.

            He doesn’t move.  He doesn’t get it.

            Shielding your eyes?  Your flesh can’t shield them.

            There’s a countdown on the screen of his discarded phone.  Sixty-nine seconds.  Sixty-eight seconds.  He’s googled that.  And somebody, somewhere, bothered to create it, to pick the colours and font to display it in.  Somebody took the time.

            Fifty-two seconds.

            “Come to the window.  Please come.”

            At least he looks up.  At least I can see his face, and note the shaggy fall of his hair, mouse-brown ignited by what’s happening in the sky into something rich and auburn, his eyes taking on gold that should be a wolf’s or a lion’s.  I can note his few freckles, and the slight upturn of his nose.  I can see that blind fear in his eyes; I can remember a look not unlike it when he first asked me out.  That shirt he’s wearing, frayed at the bottom, and isn’t a button missing?  The wallpaper, all coils and curls of young roses, formerly in browns and dark golds and bronzes and blues, now just white-gold: all stark, denuded, recoloured, rewritten.

            Our generation.  Rewriting the earth.

            Rewriting it in lava, in melting and burning.

            Twenty-one seconds.

            Did he have to download that thing?

            Seventeen.

            A flattening of trees.  A churning up of the pavement like newly ploughed furrows.  There’s the rumble in the air like a plane landing, the tension of the seconds, slippery through our fingers.  His eyes: wide and wondrous, reflecting the fire.

            Piercing light.

            Pitch darkness.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work