The Changing of the Guard: Songbird

In the next few days and weeks after the viewing of The Box, many changes came about in the world, many changes indeed....Everybody on the planet was affected in one way or another, whether they were a direct participant in the changes, or not.

Cars, for instance. A majority of people quit using their cars. Oh, it didn't happen all at once, to be sure, but happen it did. In the first few days after the veiwing of the Box, a few people here and there were seen to be abandoning their cars of city streets and freeways, and on country roads and covered bridges and parking lots as well. Quite a few of the men were observed yanking off their ties and wrist watches and throwing their cell phones as far as they could, and some of the women were seen to be tossing their purses and high heels, and often their bras and panties too. Although this phenomena was only lightly reported in the news [It seems that the newspapers and TV stations were having problems getting their employees to show up for work], it soon snow-balled into a world-wide event. Before long, even the unwilling were forced to abandon their cars [and in most cases, their jobs as well] because the streets became too clogged with discarded vehicles for anyone to drive anyway. Quickly, the world became largely un-drivable in most areas, energy companies fell like poisoned flies [they no longer had anyone to sell their products to], and Mother Earth became a far, far, different place on which to live.

Virtually no one "worked" anymore; working for a living was largely discarded as a relic from the past. There wasn't any electrical power to speak of, or natural gas, or even running water in most places. People often burned their previous residences for heat in colder areas, and used the fires to cook whatever they could catch, and, yes, dogs and cats and horses were no longer taboo. There were even reports of human beings being consumed in some parts of the world.... Disease was rampant, of course, with no decent food or clean water to be had. And, while there were some Doctors who chose to keep on "working", they had no medical supplies and no clean beds on which to lie people down. The once mighty medical professionals were reduced to being mere "hand-holders" and "brow-moppers". There weren't even enough firm people to take care of burying the dead.....

Squalor?? Yes, it was squalor, and everything else you can think about. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode tall in the saddle once again, and there was nothing anyone could [or would] do to stop them. But....the really strange part was that no one seemed to care!! The peoples of the Earth all seemed to be happy, and appeared to willingly accept their sordid fate...they smiled at one another, and hugged each other, and joined hand-in-hand to await their death, however it may come. Already, there were only a few handred thousand people left, and the end would come soon for them...

And then, there was a little matter the scientists had forgotten about, not that it mattered, because there were none left working anyway, and even if there had been a few still on "duty", they had nothing left to work with anyway. In the months before the viewing of the Box, they had been observing a rather large asteroid approaching our solar system on a trajectory that might result in a "close bypass" of the Earth. How close, no one knew for sure, and that little "factoid" had gotten lost in the days after viewing the Box. The bypass had been predicted by most to occur during the first weekend of Febrary, 2014, and now, the time was eminent....

The remaining population of the world arose on the morning of January 30, 2014, and observed a new light in their sky, a light that hadn't been there before. It was bigger than the stars appeared, but smaller than the sun or the moon. The next day, it was bigger than that, and the next, even bigger still. When they retired on the night of February 3rd, it appeared nearly as large as the moon, and had taken on a reddish glow. And, all the peoples, of all the lands on the face of the Earthl, went to sleep that night with but one thought on their minds---

"Maybe," they thought, "He is come at last".

The next morning, on Sunday, February 4th, 2014, a lone songbird, a Mockingbird if you will, somewhere in the middle of Texas, alit on the top of the belfry of a long-abandoned church. He may have been the only bird left in the world, the avians having suffered mightily from the disease ravaged world; but still, he was here, and he was ready to sing his song. He almost seemed to clear his throat, and then he began to warble. To the casual, unaffected listener, he most likely sounded like a cacaphony of noisy tweets and chirps, but that wasn't what the rest of the world heard. His song boomed across all the lands, as if amplified by giant speakers in the sky, and all heard, and all listened. Some cried at what they heard, some smiled, some became very introspective, some laughed, some got blue, and some got happy. But they all thought,

"This is my song, and I love it."

And then....they all reached hands to each other, and they all smiled, and they all reclined on the ground to watch the big orange orb descend from the sky.

And they thought, "Yes, He is here, He is here"!

And then...the Mockingbird finished his song.....

THE END