Red Dawn
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Huge great flashes and weird red things and a moon roughly the size of Alaska. They were driving north when the sky finally broke open and poured down its wrath upon humanity. Past burned-out farms with dead sheep and trees strung with schoolteachers and grey-haired country cops bloating in the midnight sun. Past abandoned mission houses adorned with skulls and crossbones. Past a pick-up truck with the windows blown out and bumper stickers touting GUNS FOR JESUS and bed strewn with Rolex watches and gold chains. Frantic young couples with box springs in tow and crates of Apple Jacks and bottles of formula fermenting in cheap foam coolers. Headed for Crapsville, North Dakota. As though another 250 miles of I-65 and ten stinking degrees of cool would save their babies. The self-styled KINGS OF THE ROAD with their cases of Miller Lite and their designer boots and their NRA hats (one has on his tee shirt from a previous life that reads HI I’M LESTER WELCOME TO WALMART) and their barrels of suspicious-looking salt pork and their ragamuffin gaggle of purloined teenage brides with swollen bellies and lifeless eyes. Aunt Fannie and Uncle Joe, looking to add another few to the fifty or so they have shared together. Sinners and saints and State Attorney Carly Sue with her demented husband and her two strung-out kids. Me, I stayed home, like the old coot in that movie about Mount Saint Helens. With a postcard from mom and a book of poems.