Psalms for the End of the World

by Cole Haddon

The space around him erupts into twinkling green light, a tree of green light actually, like thousands of branches, except these branches don’t end like they do on a real tree, dead-ending at their tips. Instead, these branches find other branches and connect again and again and again. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’ Dickie turns slowly, taking it all in, waving his hands through the tree that’s there but not really. An illusion of some sort. His smile must take up half his face. ‘What is it?’ ‘Possibilities,’ the man says. But Dickie doesn’t follow, so the man gets that look on his face that adults get when they’re trying to work out ways to make children understand things they’re never going to understand anyway. ‘Do you like who you are, Jack?’ Dickie looks away. ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘What if you could be whatever you wanted to be?’ ‘Is that what it’s like where you’re from?’ The man doesn’t answer. ‘You mustn’t be from Earth, then,’ Dickie says.