Year 45

When the world ended 44 years ago, we were told a prophecy from below. Tearing through the molten core, the mantle, the crust, the soil, the flora, the fauna, the air, and the atmosphere, in our world that had ended, we heard the voice of that thing on the tympanum of Notre Dame, the goat headed, nameless harbinger of death, the king lower than the embers of the Earth, and it said to us, "Buy flowers in year 45." 

No one imagined that the sound which came at the end of world, which prophesied, presumably, our survival, would fall on the shoulders of the florists and their consumers therein. And yet here we are, in year 44, on the cusp of 45, trying to grow nemophila and nasturtiums and alliums and the covetous rose in ground that couldn't even bear a potato or a weed. 

Within the first year of the end of the world, all the wood had rotted, all the grass had died, and all mammals ceased producing milk. Pregnant women gave birth to piles of ash and died from the shock. Small children began to grow third eyes from their foreheads which saw too much, resulting in blindness. 

In year two, the Great Replacement saw car engines suddenly swapped with husbands so that their spouses would wake next to the pistons of a Toyota leaking oil onto the bed spread, while their husbands lay mottled and curled under the hoods of their own obsolete vehicles. Lightbulbs were swapped with giant, silvery deposits of mercury which poisoned anyone who ever dared to turn on a light. All microwaves were replaced with condors which squawked and pecked to death the humans who foolishly entered their kitchens thinking the asinine would remain logical if nothing else. 

And so now we stand on the disaster that is year 44, on the cusp of year 45, eating cans of spam and drinking mountain dew which were the only two sources of food that had survived and which had, in complete surreality, multiplied innumerably all over the world, washing up on shores and even growing from trees which had previously born fruit. How the seeds of flowers were not replaced or otherwise tampered with by the End remains a mystery, but it led us all to believe that the prophecy was literal, and that we were meant to plant them at the right time in the right way to free ourselves from the limitless capacity for the bizarre in our new, but ended, planet Earth. 

Yet not a single seed would take to the soil. The End made sure of that for all other plants. But how were we to buy flowers in year 45 if there were no flowers to sell? We hadn't even gotten to how we'd pay for them yet, but that impending and inevitable catastrophe was tabled until the gardens seeded properly at the least. There were 48 hours to make these flowers grow. Will the Devil offer them to us? Will they suddenly sprout the moment we reach year 45? Will we all find ourselves with bank accounts and some semblance of normalcy, just enough that we can do as the prophecy had foretold? The Devil was not clear in his instructions and the details were inventions of the human mind, desperate for just one breath of clean air as our world spiraled through all its many possibilities of chaos.

48 hours. 47 hours. 40 hours. 35. 29. 15. The time ebbed and stalled as our panic rose. Nothing had yet grown. Nothing had yet bloomed. The prospect of buying flowers seemed more futile and absurd with each passing, aching minute. We looked at our calendars, another thing which remained somewhat normal although they appeared in unusual places (in the cans of spam, sandwiched between two slabs of concrete which appeared in bathtubs or linen closets, and so on and so on), and watched, feverishly hopeful, as night fell. Midnight came announced by our time keepers who had spent the last 44 years doing nothing but counting the seconds and minutes and hours of every day of every week of every year since the clocks stopped working the day the End began. We looked at our fruitless gardens, really just smatterings of seeds on 8x5 sections of slightly browner ash, and still not a single one had taken to the Earth. 

"So what now?" A person shouted here and there around the world. We looked at our calendars again. It was Friday. The Friday after Thanksgiving. The day the world ended 45 years prior. To call the day the world ended "Black Friday" was an irony beyond words, but it stuck. It was effective. And it was all we knew to call the string of hopeless phenomena that followed. Today was Black Friday, year 45. And not a single flower had grown for us to buy. 

There was a stampede of people in varying stages of malnutrition, preserved like specimens by a diet that would make any doctor before the End cringe and throw up, observed by a set of spectators sitting on lawn chairs or digging in the ash to make ash castles or just to put some manmade texture into the barren ground. Everyone was dressed to the nines of absurdity, bedecked in nonsensical amalgamations of cloth and rope and torn up newspapers from 45 years ago. And somehow this was all familiar, reminding those of us with any remaining mental faculties or memories from before the End of the mad scramble for Macy's early-bird sales, gathering every cent of our Kohls' cash and Starbucks gift cards to buy and buy and buy some more. We consumed our world like it was from a can, and trampled each other to death to get the better cut of meat, better savings on things we never needed, preparing for Jesus' birthday like His predecessor’s hoards of locusts descending on Egypt to take Pharaoh's son. Our last Black Friday was a prophetic nightmare that we assumed had been avoided by extending the sales to two weeks instead of one day and moving most of the consumption online. Trampling incidents had gone down that year, and it seemed like things were under control. But when the sun rose on the day of reckoning, the last ditch day for those Christmas sales we all participated in, we woke to a world where the stores were suddenly gone, the 50% off stickers lying comically, mockingly, along the sidewalks, peppering the parking lots with finger pointing despair. 

"Where have the stores gone?" Not a single package was received, not a single confirmation email was sent, and every single Etsy seller lost all traces of their digital footprints within minutes of midnight. As the strangeness set in over the years, we had forgotten about this first tragedy of failed pseudo-Santa moments. Christmas that year was resiliently celebrated as a solemn, confusing, but optimistic affair. We had hoped it would all go back to normal someday. We figured we'd know how to adapt. This was our world after all. 

But the words of the Devil were damning. The prophecy quickly scrambled our resolve, and the strangeness was completely untrackable and unfathomable horror. Our last memories of our world were spent hoarding anxious abundance for the impending holiday season. Our last thoughts were of the money we'd spent and how much such things meant to us. Call us superficial, but our world had already fallen apart in every other way — the only reliable thing we had left before the End was the power of the American dollar in a department store. 

The rest of the world felt it too. Christmas was everywhere. Money was everywhere. Even places which had no concept of the proverbial "holidays" and which could not be compelled to care less than they already did about consumerist economies, were impacted by the strangeness following the world's last designated Black Friday. Grappling with the guilt, the loss, the chaos — very few human minds made it to year 45 intact. Perhaps we could have planted flowers to be bought, as foretold by the Devil, had we not all completely lost our minds 45 years prior. Perhaps that was the point all along. 

Year 45’s Black Friday began and in a way, it was as grotesque as those who survived up until now recalled it being before the End. There were no cameras to capture the horror, but it would have made an easy, persistent, and proliferative oral history, stained into minds laden with fear and which ran on nothing but dregs of caffeine and salt and ghastly air quality. The noon sun rose into the sky and with it, the Devil spoke again, up from the molten core and into the atmosphere, to all of us, and he asked, "Where have all the flowers gone?". The planet went still. 

The way humanity turned to each other in the aftermath of that egregious offense — with murderous looks in our eyes, having fought insanity for nearly half a century on the hope of one thing alone — was a vestige of ourselves as a species and our capacity to rise against and spot injustice faster than injustice could realize itself as unpopular. It reminded us of that last Black Friday. That for all the shame and embarrassment and rabid self-centeredness this consumerist culture forced us into, we, at heart, just wanted joy. We thought of our children and how happy they would be with the things we gave them, how much we endeavored just to see them smile. As we all struggled to put food on the table and keep roofs over our heads, all we could afford after being worked half to death on abysmal hourly wages was a Barbie for 60% off at Walmart — and dammit, that's what we were gonna get. Our desire to make someone's day, to cooperate with chaos to survive, to find joy and show our love for each other, even superficially, even in callous disregard for dignity and civility, was what our proverbial "holidays" of a now bygone era were really all about. After the End, 45 years into it, with all the trauma and the strangeness and the hopelessness and pain to boot, all we wanted was us again. The flowers were supposed to give us back to each other. But when the Devil asked where the flowers had gone, we felt all at once the aching, back-breaking truth: there were never going to be flowers in year 45. 

We looked at each other. Really looked. And then turned to the Devil. We needed somewhere to direct our pain. We needed something to look at that wasn't each other, burnt by insanity and fear and betrayal. We needed something to look at that wasn't the useless seeds on the useless ground planted by our useless hands for a useless hope, stolen on Black Friday like the world was stolen half a century ago. We were naked, barely recognizable as alive, and carried the blame and the shame and the rage and the trauma of losing everything on the day we were to gain all that we were permitted to have. But our souls had been sold long ago as one does when surviving. We knew now where to point our gaze. And perhaps for the first time in the history of Heaven, the Devil looked scared.