God’s eyelid of darkness blinked, cooled and opened over rumbled silver cirrusclouds. Lightening reversed, oxygen bounced and sucked skyward, molten charred decay vanished. Wild horses galloped toward the circumhorizon arc, off the ground they seemed to fly --- toward another circumzenitral arc.

J’s TAG Heuer said 3:04 under three or four feet of water, hand to hand with Letticia.  Letticia’s black strands mysteriously, luxuriously flowed as precious bubbles geometrically percolated and paced from her O’d mouth.

They swam upward from the depths of the cool water.

J and Letticia had fled and stumbled through several yards, hand to hand, and jumped into the ember strewn, rippled water as hellish flame licks of petro fire ravaged the city.

A pristine globe—horizon to horizon---hovered over the city, dark before the sun, the globe’s perimeter haloed with blue sky.

Rain fell.

J and Letticia surfaced and opened their mouths to the sweet raindrops, which fell in perfectly spaced vertical ribbons: slowly the rain pattered but in a moment horrendously huge drops plopped absolutely straight down in violent torrents.   

There was no wind, J thought; at last inhaling air as robust and pure and clean and wild as mountain air. 

Poolside, they shivered in the storm.

Soft ferns popped up all over: almost illicitly green—at first barely visible through wall after wall of the rains. The vibrating ferns were stubborn with concerted force.  Clear water, shin deep, swelled higher, and the lacy green plants fought for their lives and grew faster than the rising flood.  By now the water in the streets lipped over, rolling white caps.  Wicked water spouts lashed twisting sky-high evil but at the same time the water cyclones traversed overland and splashed out the fires, and wondrous spray melded with mist.  As the rains quieted just after a horizontal blast that swept worldwide wrapping the equator then crisscrossing to the North and South Poles with crescendos faster than monsoon-typhoon-hurricane velocities.

“Mira! Mira!”  Letticia peered at yellow, red, pink roses, “no thorns,” she called out in the rain, her hair now flown freely as the super wind began to accelerate.

She cupped a prolix bouquet, bright as shafts of sunlight.

Rainbow columns pierced the storm, which was now well overhead---its rains inverse whirl-pooling, spiraling rapidly higher, seeming to diminish---the rainbow columns burst downward; their prismatic vividness impossible to watch. 

Bevies of manic birds darted-zipped-hopped-dove skimming the water and glided to hide beneath the ground level shade of flora and fauna.

Incredibly, souls of all ages slid down or cannonballed home within the rainbow portals. One by one, the dearly departed, their faces familiar albeit all youthful, and some older.  All those reappearing were solemn, stunned, yet bemused upon reawakening; and all from ever and nevermore continued their return to earth.

And you could hardly see the world above-its oceans had morphed to sand.  Its polar heart apparently tilted in its final glimpse as though rocking goodbye, its polar heart then a nexus of a vast, cosmic butterfly whose wings thundered once, twice, instantly flapped again as the world shook before a fourth epic fan fold of the eyed wings with a force of soft powdery matter, which again shock-waved the ground until the earth reversed its way around the glimmered sunlight.

J said, “There ought to be music…”

An iridescent flower seemed to shout out atop each fern, and the flowers covered everything in a boldly stretched instantaneous proliferation rolling all over the planet.

Wooded areas brightened.  The forest floors shone with the flowers, flowers as high as a park bench.  And there was an eight foot gap beneath a dank mist, permeated then mottled by sunlight.

Through the stillness you heard distant flows and rushing water engorged brooks, creeks, tributaries and estuaries---as well as the water roar of the great rivers, deeper now running in perpetual swirls. Heavy trout and salmon as long as yardsticks frolicked on tales, some of which leapt high to snap dragonflies or wayward katydids then spun powerfully somersaulting downstream.

Far off in the sky the transcendent earth greened-up and oceanbluewater reappeared and you could see continents reshape into familiar, ancient patterns; the liberated earth trailed tremendous braided lightening cables and it diminished brightly as though an ascendant star; well beyond the moon that was forever brighter, all of it seemingly an arm’s length away from the pointing finger of humankind.

J’s smartphone sounded Can-Can and people—as though startled from slumber yawning, eye-rubbing, and stretching---began to walk around the neighborhood through the ionized air.  J’s dark screen flashed:

                                Rejoice!

All the sick and infirmed sat up at once. And at the hospitals throngs of very old, very sick patients of all ages hurriedly dressed or fled the marble confines in bare-assed gowns.  Even the unconscious tore off apparatuses from their faces and yanked away thick tubes from their arms.

A Hindi doctor stood in the crowding hospital atrium.  He held his hands out before him and emphatically stated (forcing his voice loud), “Please! Please! Order! Line up!  Get outside if you’re able--- put one red rose petal on your tongue and let it dissolve---we think---we think” (tears steamed his Ghandiesque  spectacles and he removed them, not needing them) “we think it’s a serum, a panacea! An oral serum that cures anything that ails you…”

J’s TAG Heuer watch read 3:04:30, and he grinned like a porpoise.  His belly and hip bones scraped the bottom of Letticia’s turquoise pool.  He surfaced and amazingly hand sprung from the bull nose tile edge.  Letticia dangled her feet (toenails: did the nails glow cobalt blue?) as she futzed with a book-sized screen saying, “There’s something up with all these flowers-mira!  Carl Sagan’s at the Whitehouse!”

J leaned toward the screen over her water-beaded shoulder.  The channel was momentarily lost, the screen edge to edge with a statically herringbone-like weave.  It vibrated.

The building manager, Zertel, in a loosely fit denim dress, went from tenant to tenant and handed out ribbon-bowed mesh sacks of aspirin-sized gold coins.

Zertel said, “I heard there’s an etched creed on each one.  They’re worth spot price you know.  There’s no other money now, you know. Whatever you want has a price---just press the dollar sign on any handheld.”

J, Letticia and Zertel chatted in the 73 degree afternoon.  A configuration of what must have been stealth bombers like a gray shadow appeared in a great wedge from the west and noiselessly with translucent vapor trails, flew perpendicular straight up.  Toward outer space, the synchronized formation vanished.

And in the forest the animals scurried with the birds beneath the ferns as though at play within a dew-laden, prehistoric dawn.