Henry’s Revenge

The stones sat and baked, the ground roasted, the trees dried and cracked, and motion of any kind, least of which that would bring wind- or a temperance of the spires that creep and grow into pillars of static fury- none of this movement ventured anywhere at all.

The grass torched, the sky fizzled, and the clouds sopped up any potential calming effect the world could have used.
Pages of the Bible would curl into seashells, and the text changed from gilded and sun-kissed blessed prophecy into damning, righteous manifestos boiling over into asphalt. The books became tar, the tar became blood, the blood turned to ashes, and in that hot summer of the last year of the end times, Henry began his revenge.

Sliding and saddled with the guilt of knowledge, the time to think and the willingness to depart and separate, the angry headed bird of prey saw this and trounced and raged. The unfaithful seasons bowed to the legacy, stimulating a set of winds charged with yellow fevers spiked and mottled, and while everything silently protested this eventuality, Henry sharpened his knife in preparation for the marked edge of the day.

"Time. I want it", the birds shouted.
"Who do you think you are?", the tornado breathed.
"And how exactly are you planning on paying for this?", the sea challenged. "Time moves on, and moves you with it", the mountain derided.

The day that man went into space- like light into a prism- that day belonged to Jesus' son. In that day the river of Earth finally breached its cage. It rattled and shook all the way through the movement beyond the stars, singing like an orchestra that was shot into the air with a cosmic cannon, partly pleading, partly thanking, and silently gratefully, rising from the beginning of the end, and rotating slowly towards the eternal sameness of true faith and genesis.

And the red face of the half moon laughed.

Henry bellowed to the deserts, "Farewell, my darling. Now I will incorporate you into the sea."
And he whispered to Time, "Forget your eras and minutes and decades. Now all will be chaos for you."

He choked out his last goodbyes to the forests; "Your beauty will now be incorporated into everything else that lie here."

Here, the universe and its inhabitants cracked their facades of stoic certainty and reservation of continuity.

Henry swung an anchor up to the stars, up beyond the cackling scarlet moon, way past the fire of the sun into the belly of the everything of anything beyond what this is, making a universal foothold, and tethered the other end to the oldest trees in the ground. He spun his world outward, and apologizing to the animals and plants and brothers and soaring diamond fuels of the day, he secured the knot, ensuring structural collapse with the eventual turn of the seasons.

"I wager certain things, I experience certain things, and I try to give back certain things."

And with that, the last page was written yet to be read, and the last word was spoken, maybe never to be heard, and the world was cancelled, never to have been born.