Psalms for the End of the World

by Cole Haddon

Abdul Fattah gets his hand on the remote detonator that Iblis is holding. He depresses the trigger, the world erupts into screaming flames and screeching electronics that sound like Transformers violently fornicating, and he and Iblis are blown backwards, through the door, into a dirty Parisian alley that shatters into a cornfield worked by oxen and sweaty Chinamen, that shatters into the top deck of a British bus filled with hippies dressed in flowery shirts and corduroy, that shatters into an outdoor Catholic Mass attended by half-naked men and women with red-brown skin, that shatters into Antarctic ice as the sun rises, that shatters into and then through what seems like hundreds of floors of a skyscraper until the basement shatters into a harbour filled with primitive boats and singing men covered in tribal tattoos, that shatters into a great black planet surrounded by a churning wheel of stars and for a moment he lingers here until it, too, shatters into howling blackness and, finally, silence. No, the absence of silence.