Signs of the End of the World
Rent from DeepDyve- Signs of the End of the World
The right path. The phrase echoes in our heads as we travel west, away from the crack in the earth.There is no way around it. Some say it connects Tierra del Fuego to the North Pole and cuts deepdown to the core—a wound that lets the heat escape each minute of the day. When all of the Américasbecame a desert, dividing coast from coast, those caught in the middle either sunk into the creviceor sunk into despair. The right path. That's what Those Who Came Before tried to sell us before hell
rose from the bowels of the planet to burn the air in every lung. When the animals began to fleeand the birds headed east, we should have guessed the doom had come upon us then. But the right pathwas not to panic but to study these changes, discuss policy, hold town meetings—negotiate. Catastropheis not a politician; it's a colonizer. By the time the ground beneath our feet began to shake, wewere already dead. Our cities turned to liquid and drowned us first. Next came the age of thirst.
What comedy to witness humans think they're in control of anything. The new collectives withthe old were just as tired and useless as the past. Their lifetime of mistake and misdirection was whathad killed us. Why repeat the leadership? Why allow the yesterday to roll its ancient wheelsinto the present? Oh preachers of pretense, we silenced you. Oh teachers of nonsense, we erasedyou. The future is ours, you all said, and the future arrived, bleak and black, but with much less room
to move around. A future without windows or doors, and one ugly hole in the ground that offers no escape. [End Page 8] What future is this? We asked. And Those Who Came Before simply shrugged their shoulders and shooktheir heads. When the gas discharged from the opening we smelled the answer—sour odor of crimes againstthe land and the centuries of death that had been buried there. Out flew the bodies, the languages, and culturesto hover above us like magpies shrieking: The crack in the earth, it is us. The crack in the earth, it is ours. [End Page 9]
Rigoberto González is the author of eighteen books, most recently the memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth (2018). The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and USA Rolón fellowships, he is professor of English at Rutgers-Newark and sits on the board of trustees of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.
