Well Bottom Blues

The government radio somewhere behind me warbles its emergency signal like  tortured locusts, announcing blood rain. I have coffee and whiskey and cigarettes enough, water and canned rations aplenty. Here on the dissolving horizon of the continent, abandoned by progress, we understand how to do apocalypse properly. I ignore the robotic voice which will outlast my  supply of batteries and ghost  over to  the park. The dawn clouds are an incendiary pink against the green sky.  The birds are unconcerned, as if each knows this apocalypse is not meant for them.

A woman walks her labradoodle  among the defoliated oaks, admiring the foetus colored cumulus. Relieved of the necessity of reproduction, her children’s future as certain as her own, she is free to amble the park studying the flowering thistles and rampant Mexican violets that dot the brown lawns with color. I imagine a candle-lit, iron-barred apartment  stacked to the ceiling with Chardonnay and Alpo. She believes she is prepared but in her reverie does not see the drunken clouds assembling behind her. There is a rumble but no lightning.