Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Five-Dollar Apocalypse

Meriwether Stout entered the fortuneteller's small studio on a lark, for he didn't believe in crystal balls, astrology, or tarot.  He was a bookkeeper, a clerk who juggled numbers the way a circus clown juggled balls.  He had never dropped a six or a nine--not any number--for he was a model of circumspection and rationality.  But when Madame Zoya touched his arm, he felt a jolt of electricity jump through his veins and then burrow into the very marrow of his sixty-two-year-old bachelor bones.  For a brief moment, he felt as if his skull was a photographic negative.

"The years will be unkind," Madame Zoya told him.  "That'll be five bucks, mister."

On the street again, Meriwether was flustered and checked his pocket watch to find an anchor in the temporal, green-ledger universe.  The timepiece had mysteriously gained three hours.  The five-billion-year-old sun was lower in the sky, and the shadow of pedestrians looked elongated and ominous.  Nearly everyone was suddenly long in the tooth.

He walked on and glanced at his pocket watch again.  The minute hand was spinning wildly, like a third-base coach's arm waving a runner home.  Building facades cracked , and ivy tore great fissures in the sidewalk like tendrils of sentient, malevolent rope.  Cars grew rusty, resting on reddish-brown axles that had not spun into gear for eons.

Meriwether was nonplussed, which is to say that his brain was experiencing a minus for the first time in his Newtonian world of rational, balanced numbers.  He glanced up to see the glacier, a mile high, scraping its way down Broadway.

As Madame Zoya had predicted, the years had indeed been unkind.

~William Hammett

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