Artwork: One of Many Falls by Will Jacques

A Perfect World
Michael Furlong

Jonquil badly wanted for the world to end.

She hated the words Doomsday Prepper, because she didn’t view the apocalypse as a Doomsday, but a joyous experience to leave existence and be carried over into her beautiful new world. A world free from all human limitations, disappointments, and sadness.

Jonquil’s world.

She wanted a good view, and so had been climbing the mountain’s winding path in the afternoon, and finally came to rest at the summit, looking down at the soon to be end of the world. She unstrapped and put down her denim backpack on the rocks, no need for worldly possessions now, and waited for dark. Jonquil thought everything below looked so small, not quite real from the cliff’s edge vantage point.

Jonquil reached inside her backpack, moving past her Bible to remove a granola bar. She chewed it quickly, biting into the sweet granola, as a few crumbs landed on the edge, and danced down into oblivion along with the wrapper, pinwheeling off into space. The granola filled her stomach and left a warm feeling inside. Possibly the last food she would consume, Jonquil thought, but the prospect did not bother her.

Jonquil looked down at the town below, fashioned like a toy replica small town USA in pastel colors from her vantage point. Here’s the church, here’s the steeple. Open the door and see all the people. Here’s the parson going upstairs. And there he is now, he’s saying his prayers. Her town below took on a heavenly glow in the evening’s dusk and sat nestled in the stone streets beneath her fixed and earnest gaze.

She had skipped her evening Bible study class to see the end of the world but knew her view from on high would be worth it all, to be carried away into the majestic night’s sky as the newly chosen one. Bible study! What a waste of time, elders droning on about the prophets and miracles of the past when she was here to become a living miracle this very evening. This ecstatic rebirth belonged to Jonquil alone.

Jonquil lowered her head and crossed her heart, pinching her eyes tightly shut and praying. Leaving all this behind was good and right and meant that she would be spared all the world’s evils. She thought long and hard about her existence, her faith and being heralded into this brave new world as one of the newly chosen select elites. It was so hard being one of the chosen few and living every day with those people she knew would never ascend. The little people she used to know.

It was goodness, Jonquil believed. Her true and immense goodness that had delivered her so far, while the wicked and the damned in her town below the hill seemed to rule over this earth with their endless tirades and taunts. She took in a long, deep breath of mountain air and opened her eyes, letting her arms fly up towards the blood red sky like angels’ wings as she gazed up at the heavens.

Looking up, she could see her town was flying away from her, straight up into the heavens. Where Jonquil had spied the tops of the roofs before, now she was seeing the underside of the church, the houses, stores, cars and town square, and Jonquil’s green granola bar wrapper, flying away and vanishing up into the night, along with the inhabitants, all save Jonquil.

“Darn it all, I was ready,” Jonquil exclaimed, kicking a pink rock over the cliff’s edge with her sneaker. “I should have gone to my motherfucking Bible study class.” And the town flew far away from Jonquil, into the heavens, leaving her utterly alone, disappearing with a low moan and a thunderous blink.

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