it looks away again, looks down toward the grave, and the grave starts to churn. Suddenly—up, up, up, as if through levitation comes a pile of bones and a scrap of fabric. The bones start to spin, maybe like they are in an invisible clothes dryer. The giant white winged creature has its hands raised. Sparks fly. And suddenly there is an entire person where the bones were. The angel somehow sets this person down. A boy, about 11 years old, wearing a suit. His face is blank. He stands there.
And you are running. You have your daughter by the arm
and you are pulling her. You have the same look on your face as the woman you had seen earlier fleeing the cemetery. Now you are passing people who are approaching. They try to talk to you. They shout, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?” You don’t stop to answer. You keep running. You try to get into your car, but it is now blocked in. There is no way to get out by driving. Your daughter screams again, but you pull her across lawns. You run through backyards toward your house.
A woman shouts at you from her deck, a cell phone to her ear.
“Hey! What’s going on?”
You just keep running. ***
My husband and I have a joke where we call beautiful days
Jehovah’s Witness days. In addition to the terrible things depicted in their publications—the murderous giants and such—the Watchtower publications I read as a kid showed all kinds of pleasant scenes. Pretty, smiling women picking apples from the trees; lines of happy people walking together off toward green horizons. Of course, the lions and the lambs, together in peace. I remember the descriptions of this new world, the way my grandmother would talk about it sometimes, the way Jim Peckham explained it at our kitchen table. The world would be perfect in the new system. They actually called it that, the new system. No death. No sickness. No 32 • FLARE: The Flagler Review