EMMETSBURG: Eight

The world was changing, coming to something. It was like the universe had its own intention, like a phonograph record, where he could lift the needle and move it forwards and backwards. The outcome was always the same. The songs never changed, for the grooves were predetermined and immovable. John could only guess how impossibly large that phonograph would feel to someone the size of an atom. The grooves would be monstrous canyons of immense width and incredible heights. From that perspective the record would hardly be predictable at all.

But the world was coming to something, there could be no doubt. The old world, a time before Aeroplanes and telephones, radio and automobiles, was all falling away. The last survivors of the war between the States could be counted on one hand. The veterans of the Great War between nations were graying at the temples.

Not that the old world intended to go quietly. Not by any means. What wasn’t open to question was the shape that cataclysm would take, and whether it would again drawn in the whole world into a terrible and bloody abyss. John had his own thoughts on the matter. He didn't see folks changing all that much, making the same mistakes again and again.

The world was at peace now, mostly. Enough that it almost made John feel thyat the war, and what it had wrenched from him had somehow been noble and worthwhile. Of course that was the perspective of the living. The dead had long ago abdicated their voice to that argument. John felt alternately blessed and self-serving for that voice.
Strange, but John felt his own life was coming to something as well. Not like a storm brewing at the horizon, where the wind turned chasing birds to safer roosts, or where the leaves had flipped, offering their lighter bellies to the rain. It was nothing that was that certain. Each impending moment was a mystery, but each with an unmistakable certainty. Not as though they were predictable, but even still there was a familiarity when they at last occurred. That said, John could feel his feet firm upon a very definite path. Like the world, that path was also coming to something.

It was hot in that old truck. Maybe that’s why John was in such a mood and thinking all these crazy things. Not so much for the heat of the day. It was still cool, especially in the shadows. The unspoiled sun bore down on the truck’s rusted metal roof and barely a mile from town he was already sweating buckets into his clothes. John hooked arm outside the open window and leaned his face out enough to feel the rush of wind. Behind him golden dust wallowed in great clouds, obliterating the road and Emmetsburg.