Cataclysm Baby

Prescott, Presley, Preston

Know how we once believed our coming children would surprise us. And how we were wrong.

Know how as soon as he can speak our oldest tells us the day and date his first brother will be born, and then together they apprise us of the youngest’s coming, disclosing the hour of my wife’s water breaking, the length of her labor, the exact moment of the crowning of their brother’s head.

Know that by the end of each family breakfast they predict the rest of our day: What hour it will rain. What my wife will cook for lunch and dinner. What horrible words I will say when my sons will not stop talking, and also how I will try to make them, to force them into saying anything that is not a prediction, that is not the certainty-cursed future coming our way.

Before my wife can send them to their shared bedroom, my sons have already told her she will.

It’s there that our oldest starts his book, the book he calls his diary even though its every word is the future, some event coming later, some doom to fear, to be traumatized by both before and after.

The day he turns thirteen, he tells me I will wait three more months before I sneak into his room and read this diary, and that by then it will be too late.

He says, You could save us if you read it today, but I know you won’t.

Know it’s a lie, another adolescent taunt, a poke at what he knows has already happened, because I have read his diary, including the early entry predicting I would: At the end of the summer, our house will burn, and all my boys will burn too, caught in their shared bedroom because their mother cannot stand anymore to always be told what will happen next, cannot bear her life being scripted by her oldest son, appended and corrected in the margins by his younger brothers.

Know I could stop her. Know my sons knowing I could.

Know how when the day comes they bang their fists against the locked and nailed door, the thick-boarded windows. Know how they curse and accuse and scream for mercy when the house begins to collapse, and even after it crumbles, while still they struggle beneath its weight of wood and stone.

My wife and I hold hands in the street, at the end of our yard, safely past the widening circle of heat-blackened, smoke-wilted grass, and what joy crosses her face then, despite the last screams of our sons: To again have a world unknown, beset with unexpected joys, unplanned tribulations. To again live our lives with both doubt and hope.

Know how she says, Will you ever forgive me?

And how I say, Not yet. But soon.

And then my wife staring at my face, wondering but not knowing whether I have stolen the diary she believed still hidden in the boy’s room, secreted under their bunks.

And also not knowing that our eldest told me I would take it. That I wouldn’t be able to give up possessing the future just because he was gone.

And also: That there are only a few pages past today’s date, and on each page only a single day.

Know there is not much else to know.

Know there is a finite amount of everything remaining.

Know this future is almost over, know we will live to see it end.

And afterward: Whatever cataclysm follows, at last a surprise.