Meteors are drifting down through alien skies. My eyes wander up from the curbside, over the hair and heads of my friends. Lean an elbow on my knee, hold a warm can of Bud, swivel my sneaker heel into the crunchy pavement. It’s a nice noise. Two pale, bloated cans still stuck to the plastic web rings of the sixer. The local group keeps on. Elbows on knees, frothy sips interrupted, laughs, crunching pavement. The voices of my friends stretch out through the darkness and return to them heavy, like rubber bands. Streetlamps change the scene to a purple-blue and cream and orange, and the green outprides its grass host.
Dr. Krauss says we’ll never catch up with ourselves. That the universe is expanding so fast that even our paper knowledge will fly out of our hands and shoot for the horizon before we can go to the printer. One strong gust of wind, and a lightbulb will pop. It will be suddenly dark. We are isolated from all future generations. Our kids can’t find the sun, or even the soft moon. They won’t talk amongst themselves about the loneliness of dark matter, and they won’t remember their fathers or mothers. They will stand with their heads back, and their mouths towards rain. From clouds, their voices returned to them like rubber bands.
It’s not too late to send out the robot probes, which eons from now could fall from the skies back onto our children when the universe tips over and the tide recedes. I can picture our future grown children, in simple cotton clothes, in fields, no talking. There’s nothing to see yet. Now a buzzing stillness invades the air and our children’s clean brown heads tilt back. Their eyes search the static sky until the blue ceiling sweats forth spherical beads of cream and black. The robot probes slowly emerge, invading from above. Faster, faster and everyone scatters! Running from the past, if you want to put it that way. Down into the grass fields they go, covering their faces. The happy zooming robot probes nosedive towards our children. They slam into ponds; the peaceful surfaces respond with colossal wave-screams. The surprised meadows cough up brown clouds of dust & dirt into the booming atmosphere. Many of our children survive.
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