Red on White

This road does not wend, it is straight as a cord taut between posts. It is a furrow through miles of greensward where homes have been sown, and some sprouted up into villages, and some withered into lorn ruins.

All the details of its ruts, stones and puddles, its population of cottages and their barns, their intricacies of wood-carved eaves and shutters and fences, are equalized by the new snow. The character of a weather vane, once daedal in the spring, now lumpen and indistinct from a midden. A gutter, now a lane. A trough, now a tumulus. Every thing anonymous. Gloved by nude winter.

Where are your people? Their traceless absence is an epitaph: All that our hands have wrought, once in defiance of nature, nature has now taken back; the colors that distinguished us, extinguished in white; then by the final color of the setting sun.

God and the Last Man

Awake, he thought he'd slept into noon. The shade of the cedar felt too warm, and a thin vapor rose off the side of the pond like the steam that skirts a fire. The fire was the sun, so gravid and red that it confused and filled him with a terrible vision of holocaust.

A pair of joulops startled the water, and then the fog. Only fog. His face was hot but the morning was still cool. The forest made her familiar coughs and shuffles of diurnal inhabitants reluctantly limbering. Birdsong and the tang of dew reassured him. Nothing out of place in his furtive bivouac; not even a proper camp but just an embrasure in the woods that crowded a wide clean pool.

He wanted to bathe but he feared to stand juxtaposed with his reflection.

Instead he shook out his coat, picked up his little pack, and his staff. A few steps away he found two acceptable stones, fist-size and worn, and traded their places to honor Gaerigania, long dead. Eaten by a greater power.

What would he have seen in the mirror? A man and the last god? Or god and the last man?