The Last Predicta

Starburst

14 Starburst On the corner of every disaster lies a small store selling gasoline, coffee, cigarette lighters, Starburst. The distasteful car-wax display may double as your cardboard funerary. NASCAR scars the magazine racks. Like the American finch, building its nest so tight its nestlings drown in storms, the small store heaves against the coffee-heavy air of 7 a.m. with the persistence of the ambulance blasting Skynyrd in the lot. On the sidewalk of every disaster a star burns her prints into cement and signs there, sings to the child in us all who wishes for life less punctuated by stars burning into the earth, burning out. Like the Empire State Building of over ninety movies, including Godzilla and King Kong, we are the hinge stardom swivels on. Like the Empire State Building . . . Wait. That is the Empire State Building. 15 On the disaster of every coroner discovering how the lot of us die, we say, Where went the bloodless microscopy of television and Carl Sagan? The answer comes from the ambulance with ambivalence: Every hour is the autopsy of a second. ...