Red Moon

Religious nuts had been on the radio all afternoon, saying that it was the end of the world.  The scientist in me scoffed, but a niggly part of me felt excited by the utter conviction in their ranting. 

Dinner was uneventful.  I kept checking the clock, but time wasn’t passing by any faster.  If anything, each time I looked, it seemed to slow down a fraction more just to spite me.  Perhaps the world would end tonight.  Of boredom. 

I didn’t wash the dishes after I inhaled the food off them.  It’s a bad habit I’ve developed lately.  But I usually get them the next day, so I’ll wash them before I go to work.  That is, if the world hasn’t ended by then.

At 7:15pm a shadow fell across the full moon.  It wasn’t red.  It was maybe a little bit brown.  The real eclipse was still a bit over an hour away so I drifted back downstairs to waste some more time on the computer.  The whole affair was a bit anticlimactic so far.  Perhaps the earthquakes and the blood rain and the terrible trumpets of the angels of death would come later.

I got caught up in reading some article about the Great Barrier Reef and almost missed the 8:30 mark.  At 8:32pm I raced back up stairs.  For a moment, there was nothing in the sky.  Then the clouds must have parted, or the Earth must have shifted a fraction, for there it was.

I slid the glass aside and stepped out onto the balcony.  The red moon looked like a bit of loose flesh in the sky.  The sight was both grand and disappointing, like finding out that the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist but you can still eat chocolate eggs every year at Easter.  In that moment, I felt completely affirmed.  ‘The world is everything and that is the case.’

The Earth shifted again, and the red glowed brighter.  As the soft rays of light fell upon me, I felt myself change.  Anger.  Lust.  Madness.  The sky upended itself, tipping power through me like a waterfall through a straw.  It washed away my twenty-something years of history and replaced it with a raw and timeless need. 

My last coherent thought was that they were right.  Damn it, those fanatics had been right all along.  The world would end, and it would be my doing.