I do hear someone walking across the deck outside my room…is it the lord? No. It’s my son-in-law coming in from working on a run-down (should be BURNED down) trailer he hopes to move into someday. Son-in-law and pregnant daughter moved back in with us several months ago. He and she and now baby makes three are living in one small bedroom adjacent to our one small bathroom. He is no messiah.

My mom wouldn’t lie to me – she has been telling me how excited I should be about the impending end of the world for months now. This messianic stompathon is just the latest in a series of preacheries and propheteerings sent to me on a weekly basis. So,maybe I need to listen a little harder.

I hear my cell phone ring at 8:00 every morning, and then the beep of a voicemail. It’s some creditor, determined that I am going to send money I don’t even think I owe and certainly don’t have.

I hear the email notification go off on my husband’s computer. It’s a form letter from Job Source letting him know that a crappy, minimum wage, entry-level job is available and has only been viewed 1100 times in the past 20 minutes. Another merrily chiming email lets him know that he’s been eliminated from the pool of qualified candidates for a part-time job as a bank teller.

Wait, that sounds like footsteps…but no…it’s just that weird heart palpitation I’ve been having. I should have it checked out, along with having a 15 years overdue pap smear and my first mammogram, but I have no health insurance to go along with my no money. I guess the end of the world will solve those problems for me anyway.

I walk out to the end of the driveway, looking down the street to see if I can see Mr. JC, but I only see a row of forlorn forsale signs in front of houses that no one will buy, homes that no one here can afford to keep.

Relieved, I can hear the sawmill down the road. Some people in our sad, little hamlet still have jobs, but many are selling firewood out of their trucks, old VCR tapes from their trunks — puppies, eggs, cut flowers, worn out souls.

I can also hear the dull twang of country music and clinking glasses from our shabby shed of a town tavern. Maybe the savior stopped in there on his way. This is a rough time in a red town. Everybody knows his name and uses it often.

Back in the house I hear the television. Explosions and gunfire and coups and death. Starving babies and human rights violations. Corrupt politicians and tragically spoiled celebrities, all screwing the wrong people and spewing their bile all over the rest of us like so much Linda Blair excreta. I suppose the footsteps are being muffled by all the global drama and trauma, or maybe that’s what his holy hoofbeats sound like. I don’t know.

I’m not giving up, though. I’ll stand here and wait until those footsteps my mom can almost hear are coming my way. When they do I will meet the messiah at the front door and ask him why…why…why…and what now?