Editor’s Note: Gentle Readers, the skies above this week have changed from the clear and lovely skies welcoming the change of season to something grayer. Below the clouds there was inspiration, captured by neighbor Matt:

Thoughts of what these aircraft and pilots confronted is more in keeping with Marlow’s recent musings on the situation that confronts us all. America’s unsettled streets this week, in Louisville and the usual companions in civic violence are of concern. I have pals who maintain, somehow, that this is both peaceful protest and right wing violence. I am increasingly of a mind that this is something else, something long planned and quite resolute in a commitment to rigid central planning, and an indomitable commitment to something that looks more than a little like a word I have never used in describing American politics. In fact, I am not going to use it now, though I think you know the one I mean. I hope to bounce back to a positive, uplifting narrative shortly. But the news this morning that an executive order is required to support medical intervention babies delivered alive is quite beyond anything I was taught. Ever.

– Vic

Author’s Note: Several correspondents have shared their concerns over the political rumblings they are detecting that may result from our 2020 election. Their prophesying is based in part on the scars that life inflicted upon them and theirs. More than just reminders that our pasts are real, their scarrings soothsay an epic mode aftermath.

Thus inspired and after some revising, here’s a brief, dark, fictional look in some distant time’s rear-view mirror of a worst-case sci-fi outcome.

-Marlow

Like Charlton Heston’s movie Moses, the voter chosen presidential candidate during his 2020 election night celebration speech on national broadcast, cable and streamed TV seemingly extended his right hand symbolically over the yawning chasm that the two candidates’ campaigns had opened across the land, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of his opponent’s supporters. The horror of it was that they tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the scarred land closed itself again.

“The media lie.” he said.

“I don’t lie. I know their and the other side’s kind. What’s wrong with them is wrong all the way through them.”

“Amen,” murmured his TV-land supporters in response. “He does not. And these are his words.” as they held up chunks of rock.

“He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.”

These squalids, tens of millions in number, in their party’s colored togs nodded among themselves and were soon reckoning him correct, once again, as a “man of learning” in all his mangled speculations, and thus encouraged until they were right proselytes of a new order whereupon he silently laughed at them for fools. His wrath had lain sleeping. It was hidden many years before his selection had the power to wake it.

Yup, election night led to a swift ethnic cleansing, some said End Time, for those who believed wrongly.

The best thing for the winning side about Election 2020 night was the way the other side got their guts pulled out. Or at least that was what most of the “left behind” felt during the early post-election weeks. Then the new team’s leaders started squashing and corralling them for subsequent transfer to mandatory feeder lots and treatment stations.

Others saw it more plainly — everyone who disagreed with them was murdered in ways that made beheading look like a bridal shower. Sort of an inspired “Is that your final answer” payback response to their opponents’ incessant “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on” taunts.

Then the victors started doing the unexpected to those who had voted for them. These unfortunates got the special collector’s edition of an old timey rapture. The grim architecture of one man’s inner quest for retribution and vengeance had stood hidden in the background of those Pre-Election 2020 days. An apocalyptic starkness had remained undetected somewhere inside the winners.

They justified their actions pointing to the desperate conditions of the country they now had to fix. They asked forbearance as we got used to their new way forward.

We were all so fucked. These hidden Rambo self-appointed saviors arrived to beat the fuck out of everybody who ever disagreed with them or might at some future point think to disagree with them. By the end of their violence they all wore blood-soaked robes.

We had long ago been, but had walked away from being, our brothers’ keepers. Now they were just throw-away Americans like the dude steam cleaning our car wheels at the car wash, the Uber and Lyft drivers, wait staff and grill cooks, and the guys who put the soda and bottled water cases on our grocery store shelves — they were all getting screwed or would soon be as their jobs were automated out of existence. They weren’t quite sure why.

The reality gap between the opposing parties and their members was unfathomable. Liberal observers watching from a safe distance in New York or San Francisco concluded it was pure stupidity that caused millions of Americans to continue support of the ruling junta in the face of overwhelming evidence of lies, deceit and contempt for the constitution, even as the other side’s coastal fat cats raided these little guys retirements and picked their pockets at every turn investing their monies in crap Asian companies. Most on both sides thought the other side was motivated by plain meanness.

We should have paid attention to the reminders or tells of the dark magical thinking they displayed every day in late 2020. As always, the little unexpected ones should have slapped us silly with the reality that these people were in the grip of their own mass delusions 24 hours 7 days a week.

The truth about this new world was that anything and everything was possible. Had we not seen it all from the beginning and bled it of its strangeness, it would have appeared to us for what it truly was, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance filled with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival tent-show whose ultimate destination was unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Like wolves, we had culled ourselves. What other sentient creature could have done so? Our modern version of man had thus become the most predacious creature yet to walk the earth.

——

As W and I sat on a small county’s mountain park bench, we held each other as we rocked back and forth and blinked in the sunny chilled morning air as our breaths clouded up in front of us.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“Get a drink of water.” I said.

“Other than that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to try and head back?”

“To our Park Avenue home in the city?”

“I don’t know, where else?”

“We’d never make it.”

“Well you say.”

“We ain’t got no say.”

I was coughing again, holding my chest with my right hand and sitting as if I’d get my breath.

“What have you got, a cold?” she asked.

“It’s my consumption.”

“Consumption?”

I nodded apologetically. “Sorry, I jokingly meant TB. It’s my smoking induced COPD. It’d be better if it were my childhood TB acting up. We got pills for that.” I ended, thinking she was really saying that this was a terrible place to die in. I just had no better answer to the “Where’s a better one?” question.

We had come upon this bench as we hiked upward in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with drying round goat turds. We avoided the steep cliff to our right as we kept our gazes averted from the certain death below that awaited any misstep. The sheer rock wall to our left still showed signs of long-ago etchings that native Americans had scratched across the stone. The goat turds freshness said that a fresh meat source awaited us somewhere above. As the path widened, we came to a cleaning overlook and sat down on the bench.

We had come out there for our health and safety from the slaughter. We had left behind the “left behind.”

This place would be a hostel not of our choosing but of necessity. We would learn to sniff the air, at first uneasily, and then with purpose for food, predators and weather changes. From our mountain top bench perch, we watched storms to the east where our city lay, so distant they could not be heard.

One by one we would divest ourselves of our former ways, clothing and foods. We would favor slickers, raw wool serapes and multi pocketed vests, and one by one we would propagate about us herds and crops to be savored amidst great crackling from our initial pale fires.

These fires’ ragged sparks blew down with the wind. Our new homeland laid silent. Beyond the fire it was cold; the night skies were clear, and the stars were falling. We pulled our blankets about us each night as sheet lightning quaked sourceless, making a bluish day over the distant coastal lowlands.

Back in our city “left behind” mobs strode about with the sun in the east flushing pale red streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden flaring flashes. The earth appeared to drain up into the sky like the head of a great red phallus. Those who stayed behind were screwed.

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