Plague in the city upon a hill

America’s greatest living writer is a forty-nine year-old management consultant with a shattered moral compass and a cardboard box of unfinished manuscripts in the trunk of his silver Miata. He spends one-third of his waking time on conference calls, smiling grimly at the unblinking eye of the camera. America’s greatest living writer will never publish a single word. He dies three days before his fiftieth birthday and is survived by no one.

The final plague begins as his body flies through the windshield, the night air purpling with autumn. America never gets another chance at a great writer. In the broken headlights, his shadow is briefly ten feet tall. The master arrives as his thoughts are still cartwheeling on the grassy field between life and death. The shredded flesh of his brain doesn’t fully grasp that it’s all over. His heart, pulp on the road, cries out: Could I grow past this breaking point, like a rose through the rot? Could I plead for mercy? Could I make it out? Is there time left? Is there time left?

She scrolls through her phone. A pebble of plastic is slowly dissolving in the center of her chest and dripping down her organs, like painted tears of dew on a golden pear in a white bowl. She’s sitting at the table, chin in her hands, running through plans in her head. She is not America’s greatest living anything. She is a perfectly ordinary girl with her own small, thorn-studded hopes that fracture, then flower, starve, then devour.

America’s greatest manuscript lies in pieces on the freeway. The printed pages take to the wind. In the darkness, before the police cars crowd the scene, they are the wings of a past life.

On vacation, her dinghy knifes through the water as she sails towards the center of the lake. Time moves differently on the ropes. Not faster and not slower. Just differently. Every breath is an era of indolence. Its purpose is in the gesture of its hand, long and languid. Its purpose is the mystery of the blue hills, tall and tangled. Briefly, she peels something back and peers into the mass of cracked light underneath the water, underneath her life. She’s smiling when the sky begins to speak in a language that can be cupped in her palm. The weather, that messenger of Eden, is trying to warn her, but she doesn’t understand. Bailing out the rain, wiping the salt and the light from her eyes, she tacks repeatedly until her craft is pointed toward the nearest shore. Sitting on the sand, she watches the clouds trickle by in crowds of droplets. Every breath is a gem of joy. She doesn’t know what is stacked in her flesh like plates teetering in the cupboard. She doesn’t know her cells burst with something other than blood.

Alone in the international terminal at the airport, on the way home, the stores shuttered up, the thousand seats empty, she listens to “That’s Life” through wired earbuds and skips across the mirrored tiles. The sunrise is pressed to the floor and walls like flesh soldiered to flesh. Travelers trickle in, too tired to look at her askance. A teenager unlocks the Starbucks at Gate 78, pushing open the door with his shoulder. He ties an apron across his waist and switches the lights on. Unseen, peering through the windows with eyes the size of airplane tires, his face a mask of slippery red, the master watches her approach her gate. When they finally meet, she’ll be tied down to a single bed, watching liquid filter in uneven drops through the blue line in her arm. She won’t know what to say.

She doesn’t know this yet. She squirms in the plastic chair like a child. The world, shrunken down, radically reduced in diameter, feels close by, accessible. Her plans are suddenly at the forefront of her mind, pulsing like a headache. She has an urge to turn to the stranger next to her—a middle-aged man in a perfectly pressed suit, a notebook on his lap, his eyes locked onto something in the distance—and say, excitedly: “I have a feeling like life is…”

Ah. How to finish that thought? Her mind has bumped into something unseen and it jolts her into another state of being, as though awoken while sleepwalking. She’s conscious that something lies in the balance, but she doesn’t know what. The last battle is yet to be fought. But time is falling into a deep hole. The blade now approaches the cord. The body lies bloody on the tar.

I have a feeling like life is

I have a feeling like life is