DAy 7: See the Turtle

 Stanzas

The park disappeared. The world went dark. She was a black woman, still young and undoubtedly beautiful, sitting on a park bench beside a fountain and a metal turtle with a wet and gleaming shell. She might have been meditating on this warm late-spring afternoon in the year of 1999.

And, had she not stopped to listen to the man playing the guitar, who knows how much of what followed might have been different?

She falls forward into the darkness and the soft beeping of machinery and the last voice she hears is that of Walter Cronkite, telling her Diem and Nhu are dead, astronaut Alan Shephard is dead, Lyndon Johnson is dead, Rock Hudson is dead, Roland of Gilead is dead, Eddie of New York is dead, Jake of New York is dead, the world is dead, the worlds, the Tower is falling, a trillion universes are merging, and all is Discordia, all is ruin, all is ended.