The End of the World As We Know It Will Be Fine

Harry McDermott

P O Box 8361

Fayetteville, AR 72703-0007

479-444-7853

[email protected]

© 2021

1341 words

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT WILL BE FINE

“Will it be today?” Liz asks grabbing her heart necklace.

“My guess is no, but that is just me being positive, says Cork. He was earlier toasting these dark days in his back yard, which is a very positive thing to do by yourself. Plants like to be talked to, so dark days must love being celebrated.

“It is the heat,” Liz decides.

“It’s been hotter,” says Cork thinking he was not in the mood today to hold her and hurl them over the end of the world like cannon balls aimed at heaven. He remembers them at the Space People ritual receiving their lock hearts as naked as newly born babies, less all the screaming. Hugs all around afterwards.

“Am I aimed right?” Liz asks. It was like Cork did all the painting, but only when she wanted the art done. The echo of her mother’s comment about Cork came back, “It is like you are eating the fruit, but it’s your boyfriend who spits out all the seeds and plants them.” That is all Liz needs at this moment, the end of the world smashing down while she brains herself into it instead of safely away.

“Our choices right now are spending time preparing with worry to be ready, or just enjoying what maybe our last moments on earth together doing anything fun and light hearted,” mumbled Cork at her. He knew the lock heart generation would have to take over and rebuild the utopia predicted by Nostradamus, but only after suffering all the headaches from watching the murder of the world wander way up, sideways, and then back down.

Liz now angry at him replies, “I know we have been helped by the Space People. They told us we will survive what is coming. But it’s not like they instructed us to build a bomb shelter and be in it by high noon, like the way God instructed Noah to build an ark. I do not see how we are even going to have our same bodies afterwards; we will probably turn into a weave of lights like they are.”

“You are wrong because why would they give us these heart shaped locket necklaces made out of God knows what to wear?” Cork says thinking about how his parents had been really good people. By the time they had him they still had long hippie hair and wrinkled clean clothes and beamed about everything. This amazed Cork as he got older because almost one-half of America was so greedy and filled with hate, and the very rich were selling everyone’s future environment for more wealth to stuff into their pockets. But his parents taught him to meditate with love past all of that as well as the terrorist war so that the Space People would come and visit him. They taught him how everyone was right about God, especially the atheists. And most important, they taught him how to feel that the universe loved him and for him to love everything back to happy exist. His parents knew a mind filled with relaxing love thoughts attracted the Space People like moths to a bright light on a porch. Think of them as angels they told him. What they did not tell him was their intelligence was only equaled by their wit.

At his first encounter with the light beings, they began their explanation of how they had ignored the speed of light to be with him by saying, “We are all connected.” They told him they could be with him by just thinking about being with him and how they taught their flying saucers to do the same. They told Cork they had a gift for him: a book entitled “How to Serve Man.” As the fear barked up his heart rate, they said with quiet laughter, “Just kidding. We are just going to heal your chronic back pain.” And they did.

Liz is thinking about when the Space People arranged for “the chosen” to be at a meeting with them in Hot Springs, Colorado, and how they had announced they would be soon flying about all over the world to announce their presence and how this would help everyone to understand Nostradamus. The Space People adored Nostradamus. Right after she got back home she had filled her head with his prophecy quatrains. She recited them now to Cork, “The third big war will begin when the New City is burning…. it will last about 27 years afterwards and the war will destroy cities and kill millions…the king of this terrorism will be defeated by the Eagle and the Bear…mankind will discover objects in space sent to us by the watchers… the end will come when of the dancing horse the number of circles will be nine…and then there will be peace of a thousand years…”

“It has not been 27 years since 9-11,” Cork pointed out with a smile.

“We both well know Nostradamus was not accurately able to describe long periods of time in the future,” says Liz. “Look, we are both furiously gripping with white knuckles onto what appears to be the red-neck apocalypse. The clumsy violence on our city streets, the gun shootings every day, the terrorist battles and bombings, and now the threat they have nuclear weapons. As sad and sick as this makes us feel, how can the sun shining all around your good heart push you out of bed to embrace our trouble like it is a lost lover, a mistake than can be fixed. Jesus, my mother always told me there are things that cannot be fixed. We are so out of harmony with earth now its bad weather, like the war from the terrorists, is ascending on us like violins stabbing out loud staccato music in a scary movie. There is not enough mercy left to save the world from the teeth of the tornadoes, hurricanes, the drought, and the virus plague.”

“Please try to relax. We will grow old afterwards even though it probably will not be how people usually grow old,” says Cork. He knows Liz does not like living on a cliff edge labyrinth and she needs to know exactly how they are going to wind down their last days on earth. He knows she was not raised loving everything. But he does not know how to explain that she will have to squeeze happiness out of the radiation miasma that is coming in order to survive. Maybe he can compare it to suddenly having to live in a pasture of poison ivy and that by loving the dangerous plants, they will leave them alone. Or maybe he could compare it to the way religious people safely handle snakes at a church by Christian loving them.

“Magical Space People thinking is not going to save us from the bruising everyone is suffering while pretending there is nothing wrong,” says Liz.

“I know you have had enough of world misery, and I know you did not grow up with hippie parents, and you just met the Space People in Colorado; but, you are just going to have trust me and do everything I do to survive. Think about how magical your heart necklace gift is and what it means,” says Cork being overwhelmed with sadness. He is realizing the possibility that his dragging Liz to the meeting with the Space People and her being around him might not be enough to save her. She might not be able to embrace the radiation with enough love to save her from it. And then he begins a silent mantra, “I guess this is all right. It is meant to be. Everything happens for a reason. I must love the way the universe is, and like all the other requests of God, I must with love give up what I love to happily exist.”

Cork stops smiling and hugs Liz saying, “I love you.”