The stooped and wrinkled grey man stands in a disshevelled suit, holding a sharpened, white-painted dowel three feet long. It is not so much his suit as his skin that is ill-fitting. With the dowel, he indicates a point roughly at the level of his higher shoulder, vaguely to the right.
“Your world will freeze,” he intones. He speaks slowly, as if he must tear each syllable from deep inside himself. He waggles the stick for emphasis.
“Bad things; terrible portents and omens; and just-” he pauses and turns his head, appearing to consider the symbols and wavy lines that dance across the field of maps behind him. “Just, awful.”
As if the weight of the moment and the crushing reality have finally set in, his shoulders drop. His face appears to age ten, twenty, fifty, one thousand years in a moment, all youth and joy and beauty draining like a plug has been pulled out of the base of his spine.
He hefts the dowel generally to the left.
“Every liquid you have ever known will be replaced by a solid mass of despair. There will be no tomorrow. The sun will freeze in the sky and the moon will shatter into a billion frozen fish-stick-sized chunks. You will be pelted with them for the rest of eternity, their flickers of flaming demise will perhaps be the only warmth left on the dead and blasted surface of this rotten husk of a planet.”
A woman in a smart suit, her hair styled and sculpted each strand by a team of experts with agendas into a bouquet of perfection, sits nearby at a desk. She stares into the middle distance, then suddenly comes alive when the glare of focus turns from the doomed shade to her.
“Guess we’d better wrap those pipes, right Dan?”
The gray man’s dead stare remains fixed on unknowable horrors beyond comprehension of mortal minds, only his mouth writhing and twisting wetly to form words. “Your pipes will be the least of your concerns when this gehenna freezes the very fiction of your soul.”
She giggles and assumes a look of grave, if theatrical, concern. “That’s right, Dan. If you’re cold, they’re cold. Remember to bring in your cats and dogs. And your outdoor house-plants!”
From the depths of his misery, the man in the suit sighs a shuddering, mangled sigh that wishes in its darkest moments that it was a scream from noneuclidian rooftops above a slithering city of pain.
“Well, thanks, meteorologist Dan §»¡ǎï¿œ! And now Denise Wizenby, our Hometown Sports Hero. Denise, how are the Packers looking this week?”
| Reading | Ruth Gibbs |
| Reading | Izzy |
| &c. | Ben Gibbs |