As it Ends

As it Ends
         Hippies plod along beneath setting desert sun; their covered carts’ wooden wheels roll through sand. The wheels are chipped and inefficient, but they roll. Guitars and tambourines play an unpracticed ode to a pastel sky while a chorus of birds serenades the minstrels.
         Among the clouds, and above the birds, fly rockets, planes, and medusa-like parachute soldiers. Militants don’t see hippies; they see only targets. Target cities, target schools, target people, target nation.
         The hippies left everything behind. The cities, the lights, the calendars and clocks; it’s all behind. Everyone was given a democratic choice: expelled hippy or bloodthirsty militant.
         The map says that they are almost where they are going.
         Soon they will dig an impenetrable refuge deep in the sand. They will wait for that time when the sky’s light reveals a canister falling at 9.8m/s2; a canister whose light will hide everything beneath a veil of energy.
           Gunshots from civilization have stippled the hippies’ strumming since they first left. It’s a macabre rhythm to play to. Sunshine’s unclipped fingernails begin to scratch azure marks into the blackened slate of night; the shooting intensifies with the day’s enlightenment. The more you see, the more you shoot. Today, the shooting suddenly stops. The caravan stops. The children’s cart jostles and stops. Only one guitarist plucks a duet with the last chirps of the last bird. The hippies bow their heads and wait to be white washed by the wave that has come early.