Peripheral Visions: Let the Sun Shine In

"Peripheral Visions: They shimmer darkly in the fringes, there to see for those who look. Turn your glance quickly, or you won't see them... until it's too late."

Let the Sun Shine In

"If you look up, Dad, you can see for yourself that Ogden is real," Dale said to his father.

Dale's father, Victor, took another shuffling step toward the car, one hand on Dale's forearm, the other on his cane. He didn't say anything in response.

"Because it's up there, bright as the moon," Dale said.

I rolled my eyes. Bright as the moon it was not, unless we were talking about a crescent moon. But it was brighter than any star, and getting bigger every evening.

Victor took another step, then reached toward the car's roof. I took the cane from his unsteady hand. Dale helped Victor half crawl, half slide into the passenger's seat.

I got into the back seat as Dale shut the door and crossed around the front of the car to get in the driver's side.

My door thunked shut with a solid, satisfying sound. A moment later, so did Dale's. I fastened my seatbelt as Dale, leaning over, fussed with Victor's.

"You might as well just leave it," Victor said. "What's gonna happen, we're gonna crash? We're gonna die? No skin off my teeth..."

"You know it's the law, Dad," Dale said, pulling on the strap, which only grudgingly played out. He yanked a couple more times with short, sharp pulls, then got the buckle into place. The seatbelt clicked shut.

Dale fastened his own seat belt. "And anyway, the car would beep at us the whole time."

Victor muttered something unintelligible. Dale caught my eye in the rear-view mirror. I could see what he was thinking: His father, a retired police officer, used to be fanatical about following the law. No infraction was too small, and nothing escaped his notice.

But the rule of law had become much less important to him these days. What mattered to Victor now were the dictates of the whimsical, ignorant man-child who had turned the presidency into a lifetime appointment.

"He's doing good things for the country" was his refrain any time Dale ventured to try to debate politics with him.

Of course, "doing good things for the country" hadn't extended to taking any meaningful action when the latest pandemic hit a couple years ago. And it didn't mean doing anything about the massive asteroid that was streaking toward Earth. Quite the reverse, actually. Federal policy, and political correctness, took the position that the asteroid did not exist. Why would anyone be troubled by the plain sight of it right there on the nighttime horizon when the president, with three words –�"It's a hoax" –�had effortlessly banished it from our collective reality?

Except reality was no longer collective. Like everything else, it had become a matter of political affiliation and, for half the country (and almost the entire government), an exercise in magical thinking.

Dale started the car. He wasn't about to let Victor off the hook; as the engine came to life he needled his father with, "If I cut over on Dowager Street, you'll be able to see Ogden through the windshield."

"Don't bother," Victor said. "I don't need to look. I already know it's ain't nothing there."

Dale chuckled. "You diabolical old man," he muttered, in a voice too soft and low for Victor to hear him.

But the old man wasn't as deaf, at that moment, as he usually seemed to be. "You respect your father," he said.

I kept an eye on Dale by way of the rear-view mirror as his forehead crinkled into a tight frown. Looking at the back of his head, the side of his jaw visible, I could see more tension gathering as his shoulders bunched and his teeth clenched.

"Sweetheart," I said. "Breathe."

"Listen to your husband," Victor said.

"Yeah, now he's my husband," Dale muttered.

He had a point; Victor wouldn't even acknowledge me for the first six years Dale and I were together. He and Madeleine had attended our wedding, to our surprise, but Victor had made it a point to announce that as far as he was concerned ours was a "pretend" union, and not the genuine article. That, he maintained, was only possible between one man and one woman.

Dale had hurled some comment about all the Old Testament bigwigs who had multiple wives, and a brief, vicious argument had ensued. Madeleine had made peace; for a moment I had thought they might leave before the ceremony. Later, at the reception, Victor had sat slouched in his chair, seated next to Madeleine, Dale's sister Jodi, and Jodi's husband, Kurt, who was also a police officer. Victor had a scowl on his face the whole time.

But the law was the law, and the law said I was his son's husband, and family, Victor said, was more important than anything else. He started to acknowledge and even address me at family functions, though it was usually to ask me how I had managed to turn his son into a "faggot" or a "fruit fly" or any of six other imprecations he liked to use.

We'd gotten married five years earlier. About two years into our marriage, at a Thanksgiving gathering, Victor and I had suddenly, unexpectedly bonded – over a college football game, of all things. I was rooting for Yale, since that was Dale's alma mater. Victor was rooting against both Yale and Princeton, saying that Ivy League schools were nothing but empty, expensive snobbery. But we both got caught up in a string of brilliant plays that Yale executed, and somehow that broke the ice and thawed him out toward me.

If I'm honest, it thawed me out, too. I had thought Victor was nothing but a willfully ignorant homophobe. I started to see more to him after that day. He's opinionated and stubborn and certain of his own correctness; he's also narrow-minded and, yes, a bigot. But once he lets you in, he's loyal and warm, and for all that he's determined to cling to right-wing disinformation, even when it doesn't make any logical sense, he's smart and funny – sometimes caustically so, but I like that about him.

I think it helped ease things between father and son once Victor and I decided we liked each other. But then Madeleine died, and Victor seemed to shrivel physically. His eyes started failing him; his joints grew painful; he started moving slowly, hesitantly, like an old man. My heart broke for him, and I know Dale's did, too.

He'd also shriveled ideologically. Victor was clinging mighty hard to a whole trove of right-wing idiocies these days, and it was getting hard for Dale to be around him... hard even for me, though I still love the cranky old guy.

As we drove across town to Jodi's for a Christmas Eve get together, Ogden blazing in the sky like the original Star of Bethlehem – hard, implacable, unblinking. I could feel Dale's anger and exasperation pouring off him. Victor, meantime, was scrolling on his phone, probably looking at right-wing propaganda from so-called "legitimate" news sources.

Outright denial of Ogden's existence had happened rapidly, but not all at once. Rather, it came about in now-familiar stages, pretty much the same way denials of other, lesser crises had unfolded. The president's supporters had greeted the news of the asteroid with a wall of determined prevarications. The danger was being exaggerated, they said, by the president's critics, who were desperate to find any rationale to take him down. That line soon transformed into claims that Ogden wasn't an approaching asteroid at all, but a new space station put into orbit (in less than a month, evidently) by the Chinese... a space station that was at least eighteen times larger than their old one. The talking heads on Foax News, OnePatriot, SinBad, and other "conservative" news channels witlessly parroted those claims.

When the narrative shifted from Ogden being an "exaggeration" to it being an outright fabrication, the president's cabinet, the right-wing news sources, and every single Theopublican unhesitatingly embraced the new party line: Ogden didn't even exist. There was no new light in the night sky (even though, by then, Ogden had grown bright enough to be seen even in the daytime). There was no beacon of impending planetary demise growing noticeably larger. And in two months, there would be no extinction-level impact as a rock three thousand, six hundred miles in diameter collided with the Earth. How could there be any such collision when there was no such gigantic rock hurtling toward us?

Our president, our lawmakers, and half our fellow countrymen looked into the sky, right at Ogden, and said it wasn't there.

Or, like Victor, they wouldn't even look, justifying this refusal by saying they didn't need to. They already knew the sky was tranquil place, empty of anything except sun, moon, stars, and God.

***

Jodi greeted us at the front door, ushering us in with a stream of small talk and exclamations that far outpaced Victor's slow-moving progress and Dale's patient support. I followed behind, a box in my arms that contained gifts, bottles of wine, and two pies –�one supposedly pumpkin, the other full of imitation pecans.

"So, the wool overcoat," Jodi said to her father. "And you're even wearing a tie. You really dressed up for the occasion, didn't you, Dad?" Jodi glanced at me, and her face looked like a mask – distorted, caught between a smile of welcome and a grimace. Her eyes touched on mine, then darted over my shoulder, wide with fear.

I knew that she was looking at Ogden, and not wanting to. I also knew that she would never admit to its existence – not until or unless the president, and her husband Kurt, acknowledged it first.

But Jodi couldn't escape the sight, looming as it was on the horizon just outside her front door. As long as the door was open and she was standing there, she was going to see Ogden hanging in the sky, and both she and the door would remain where they were as long as Victor was inching his way into the front hall. It was almost literally killing her – I could see that from where I was standing.

As soon as I could move past Dale and Victor and into the front hall, I carefully made my way inside and held the box out to her. "Here," I said. "Why don't you take this, and I'll help out here."

Jodi smiled gratefully and took the box. I made my way past Victor, who was sitting down on a small bench near a row of coat hooks, and shut the door.

There. No more evil liberal hoax. We were all safe and sound and could pretend the world wasn't about to end.

Dale helped his father get out of this overcoat while I helped get his shoes off. Jodi and Kurt were fanatical about people not wearing shoes in their house.

Something seemed off, and it wasn't until the three of us – coats and shoes shed – made our way into the living room that I realized Bradley and Zeera weren't there.

"Brad," I called out. "Zee? Your favorite uncles are here."

"Favorite uncles?" Dale asked me, glancing over as he helped Victor navigate into Kurt's big recliner. "Try: Only uncles."

"Your only uncles, who also happen to be the fun ones," I called.

There was no response. Jodi came into the living room, carrying a tray of highballs.

"The kids are... well, they're not here," she said with that same mix of nerves and holiday cheer.

"Yeah?" Dale said, as Victor finally settled into place like a boulder.

"Where are they?" Victor suddenly demanded, his voice loud enough to make Dale – who was still bending over his father, his ear next to the old man's mouth – flinch.

Kurt entered the room carrying a highball of his own. "Christmas drinks!" he hailed us. Lifting his glass, he said, "Jack and Seven."

"Oh, wonderful," I said, more loudly than I'd intended. Christmas morning was going to be a joyous hangover. Meantime, the odds had increased that Silent Night, Holy Night would turn into a full-on drunken fistfight.

"The kids are in, uh... I mean, they, they're visiting with..." Jodi stammered.

"The kids are in Australia," Kurt said, trying to pronounce the name of the continent the way a someone who lived there would. His rendition sounded like "Ass-Tray-Ya."

"What the hell are they doing down there?" Victor demanded, his voice still loud. He accepted a glass from Jodi and gulped at it.

"Yeah, Dad, that's... that's booze, you know," Jodi said fretfully. "It's not iced tea."

"Why did you send the kids all the way across the planet?" Victor demanded.

Jodi put a hand to her forehead, her eyes looking trapped, her smile hanging to her lips by sheer force of will.

"Visiting, you say? Visiting who? Friends?" Victor demanded. "Since when do you have friends in some other country?"

Kurt was taking a long drink from his glass. He swallowed and announced, "We sent them to a Christian boarding school there."

"What? What the hell for? They can't get a good Christian education here?"

"Well, now, Dad," Jodi began.

"We got good Christian schools again. Kirsch got the – "

Victor uttered a hideous racial slur at this point, and I cringed.

" – out of the country, or else locked them up, and there's no more of that critic's choice theory or whatever it was. And all those perverted fag books they used to force on school kids..." Victor cut himself off, even as I felt myself cringing again. He shot a glance toward Dale and me. I spared my own quick look at my husband and saw him glaring at his father with a look of absolute disgust.

Even Jodi seemed taken aback. Not Kurt, though. Kurt tossed back the rest of his drink and said, "True enough, but... well, you know what, there's something to be said for trying out another culture for a while. Another white culture," he added, before turning away and heading back toward the kitchen. "Refills, anyone?" he called over his shoulder.

"No," I said.

"Yeah," Dale said.

I looked at my husband again, at the glass in his hand, and saw with a shock that it was already empty.

***

The gifts were under the tree. Jodi said she would sure and send Bradley and Zee's gifts to them, though they wouldn't arrive until after New Year's. "And it will probably cost about three hundred dollars apiece to ship the packages," she added, with a brittle, victimized "but who cares?" zing in her voice.

We were sitting at the dining room table. I was nodding politely as dishes made their way to me from around the table – turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, yellow rolls that Jodi said were made with saffron. Everything was made out of tofu, texturing gels, and artificial flavors, of course, but I just said, "Saffron! Fancy!" and let it go.

Even made out of tofu, the dinner must have cost them a pretty penny.

There were even a couple of bottles of white wine. "Pouilly-Fuissé," Kurt said.

"Pretty fussy," Jodi laughed, making a joke of it. Kurt was an amateur chef, and was always talking about wine pairings, even though wine, like food, wasn't quite what it used to be before... well, before everything. Drought. Heat. Savage storms. Crop blight, crop pests, unkillable weeds, genetic cross-contamination that rendered half the crops this year underproductive and imparted a bitter taste to the fruits of the diminished harvest. Supply chain fuckups that caused half of what they did harvest to rot in the trucks or on the docks before they could be delivered.

Fuckups, did I say? Foax News was pretty sure, as were all the president's supporters, that it was all a matter of sabotage. By whom, they didn't say, except to hurl the usual insults about "crazy liberals" and "demented Democrats" and "deep state socialists," though what the deep state would be doing in the vast agricorp fields or the security-conscious trucking hubs and shipping docks, I couldn't imagine.

Oh, and the queers were in on it, of course. We queers somehow had a hand in everything. Evidently, we had the stamina and endlessly varied skill sets of comic book heroes. We could "pretend" to be workers and family members by day, but then by night – so the story went – we came alive with fiendish energy, hacking the computer systems of distribution centers, utility companies, and shipping concerns, and finding other ways of creating chaos around the country.

There wasn't a lot of detail about how, exactly, we had time and expertise to pull off the fuel shortage, the rolling blackouts, and all the rest – though there was a fairly elaborate story about how we had created last summer's wildfires. Evidently, we had teamed up with the Jews and used their space laser.

The president said so in a three a.m. social media post that was part of a blizzard of mostly nonsensical and disjointed dispatches to platforms like FacePalm and Fleeter. Obviously, it had to be true, along with his observations about "Cambrian Coffee" (it "sucked," whatever it was) and his complaints about the socialist schemes of the Danish Truckers Guild (an entity had never existed before the president summoned it into being, at least in the minds of his followers).

Jodi tried to make dinnertime conversation. Kurt made a show of slurping at his wine and talked about "mouthfeel." Victor sat there like an an idol carved of stone, inscrutable, almost motionless except for the way his fork moved between the stuffing and the mashed potatoes, though he was not actually eating anything. Dale took a bite, chewed it with humorless determination, swallowed, and then repeated the process.

I loitered in my thoughts, wondering if the deadly wildfire-creating space laser was in danger of eventually crashing into the nonexistent asteroid. Would it, and a bunch of other orbiting hardware, end up scattered in pieces across Ogden's surface? Or would the space lasers and satellites manage to be on the other side of the Earth when Ogden came streaking into the atmosphere, melting, burning, setting the air on fire?

Imagine: A space laser orbiting above a planetary surface that had turned into molten lava. A grave marker presiding over a dead world. A monument to folly and fantasy that had utterly displaced facts and sober reason. If only space lasers truly existed, I thought, maybe we could use them on killer asteroids.

I shook my head to clear it of doomsday visions and tried the wine. I was astonished that it really was Pouilly-Fuissé... that it was real wine at all, actually, but even when real wine still existed in quantities plentiful enough for ordinary people to buy, Pouilly-Fuissé had been one of the more expensive varietals.

"Jesus, Kurt," I said. "This is the stuff!"

Kurt, scowling, shook his head at me, and Jodi looked scandalized.

Oh my god, I thought, unrepentantly, I've taken the Lord's name in vain. "Sorry," I said aloud. "It's just... this is real. I mean, it really is..."

"Yeah," Kurt said, a smile coming back over his face. He radiated pride. "I kept a case in the cellar for... how long?" He looked at Jodi.

"Oh, we must have bought that before Bradley was born," Jodi said.

"I hope so," Kurt laughed. "Well before he was born. We bought it for our wedding reception."

"Really?"

"I stuck the leftover bottles right in the cellar and thought... you know... this is for our silver anniversary. Our golden anniversary. Special times."

"Like now?" I asked, turning the glass by the stem.

Kurt smiled. "Like now. Christmas with family."

"But without grandkids," Victor said irritably. He reached for his own glass, which was empty. "Where's mine?"

"Dad, you already had a Jack and Seven, and with your medication..." Jodi started.

"Kurt, I said: Where's mine?" Victor repeated.

Kurt made a magnanimous gesture, and half rose from his chair in order to reach across the table and pour his father-in-law a glass of wine. Then he poured a splash into my glass, topping me up, before offering the bottle around to the rest of the table. No one else needed any.

"Special times," Kurt toasted, and everyone took a sip.

Dale smacked his lips showily, and then said, "Special. Like that time Jodi got vaccinated on the DL, but told the other members of the school board that she'd never surrender her liberty by getting a COVID shot."

"Here we go," Kurt said, rolling his eyes.

"Dale," Jodi said, tightly.

"Oh, I'm sorry, was that a secret? Well, I won't tell 'em down at the country club," Dale said.

"COVID was a hoax," Kurt said.

"Which one? COVID-21? The hoax that killed eight million people worldwide? Or do you mean COVID-23... no, I mean 24, the one two years ago, the one that that killed sixteen million? Including our mother?"

"Dale, that's enough," Victor said, his voice not loud this time.

Dale looked at his glass of wine. No one said anything.

"Sorry," Dale said, and took another sip. He looked up at Kurt. "This really is amazing," he said.

Jodi was looking at the table with glistening eyes, but Kurt seemed unfazed. Then he smiled, half rose from his chair again, and poured a little more into Dale's glass.

"To family," he said.

***

"Christian boarding school," Dale said – not muttering this time, his voice strident with anger – as we drove home. We were alone in the car. Victor was sleeping at Jodi and Kurt's.

I glanced out the passenger-side window at Ogden, bright as a diamond, bigger tonight than it had been the night before.

"Do you think it really comes from another solar system?" I asked.

The New York Times... in one of the last science articles it published before the president sent troops in to shoot three editors, arrest everyone else, and seize all the paper's computers as "evidence"... had run an interview with a scientist who suggested that maybe Ogden wasn't an asteroid, but rather a dwarf planet –�a tiny world that might have been circling our Sun in a thousand-year orbit. Or maybe Ogden was a visitor from across the galaxy, thrown out of its home system by a passing gas giant, or through a gravitational interaction with a wandering star.

Thousand-year orbits. Million-year trajectories. An assassin from deep in the darkness, making infrequent flybys of the inner solar system, or else an orphan, kicked out of its home like a queer kid... like I was, twenty years ago. I thought about my own parents, my own sister and brother. If we were ever going to patch things up, it had to be now.

Would such a thing be possible? Would it even be worth it?

"What did they say? It's two months out?" I asked, still staring at Ogden.

"I don't know," Dale mumbled, angry, stewing about his sister's hypocrisy. "The least they could do is admit they're hoping the other fake news is true, and Australia will be safe. 'Hey! It's all a hoax, but since I'm so used to magical thinking I really can't tell anymore! So let's send the kids Down Under, where lollipops grown on trees!' "

"Dale, knock it off," I said.

"Yeah?" my husband asked in a surly voice.

"Yeah. Everyone knows there are no trees in Australia. It's at the bottom of the Earth. They all fall off."

The comment hung in the air for a moment and then had its desired effect. He started laughing. We both did.

"And it's not like anyone else is doing anything about it. England... Japan... the European Union, or what's left of it, anyway... no one has a plan, no one even wants to admit..." His eyes flicked to the right, to where the intruder hung glittering in the sky. "Admit it's there."

"Authoritarian governments don't do anything," I said, as though it needed saying. We'd talked about this many times before. "And the world's democracies are... not, anymore. So, no. Nobody's gonna do anything. Doing something, even admitting something needs to be done... that's too much like real news."

"Facts," Dale said. "Ewww! Keep them away."

" 'I take no responsibility,' " I mimicked.

" 'We're turning the corner!' "

" 'Let the sun shine in!' " we both sang as one, and this time we laughed until we damn near cried.

"Oh, my god," Dale said. "The sheer bull-headed, stupid, meaningless absurdity of it. I mean, Jesus."

'Dale!" I scolded in an imitation of Kurt's voice.

We laughed again. Then we drove on in silence.

Dale sighed. "Yeah, two months. Actually, I think it's more like six weeks. Around the first week in February. Close enough that, as of now, it's only a six percent chance that the rock will miss us."

"That's still six percent," I offered.

"If there were one hundred parallel universes, with identical Earths in this exact situation," Dale said, "only six of them would survive."

"No," I said. "Either the rock's gonna hit us, or it's not. It's not gonna... I don't know, swerve at the last minute or something."

***

But six weeks later, when Ogden missed Earth by eighty-four thousand miles – cutting inside the Moon's orbit as it flew past, but luckily missing the Moon – that's exactly what the president said had happened.

"It was heading right for us, and then, because God loves us, it swerved at the last minute. The scientists can't figure it out. But you know why that is, though, it's because scientists are clueless. They don't know anything. And you all know the truth. We all know the truth. We don't have to know anything to know the truth, and the people who know everything don't know anything!"

I heard the president's patter – ceaseless, loopy, insincere, which was how he always sounded – playing on Dale's phone as Dale was shaving. I heard Dale, too, talking back as the speech meandered on, and I also heard Dale yelp when, offering an icy retort, he managed to cut his lip with the razor.

"Sweetheart," I said. "Be careful." I offered him a couple squares of toilet paper to blot with.

He waved me away and brought cupped hands full of water to his face to rinse away the lather and the blood. The cut promptly welled up again, red-tinged water dripping from his chin. He sighed and accepted the toilet paper.

"Now, all of a sudden, Ogden is real and not a 'hoax,' " Dale complained.

"Of course," I said.

"And even though it's now real, the 'crazy liberals' were still just trying to scare hard-working Americans with fake stories of doomsday and death," Dale said.

"Did we expect anything else? They're commies, after all," I said.

"Socialists," Dale said. "Let's be sure we use the right word. Because words have meaning, and meanings matter."

"Right," I said. "Socialists. Which, by definition, are people who believe in science, and who value expertise when it comes to social policy and, I dunno, the end of the fucking world. Which we never bothered to do anything about, because it was all a hoax."

"Until it wasn't a hoax," Dale said. "And anyhow, God pushed the asteroid off its course so that it would miss Earth."

"Oh, so the socialists were right? The big mean rock really was headed towards the Earth?" I asked.

"No, because God was always going to protect us," Dale said. He looked at the wet, blood-spattered toilet paper, and then peered into the mirror. He sighed and shot a little more shaving foam into his hand, then dabbed at his face. He was less than half shaven after twenty minutes of arguing with the Idiot in Chief.

"However it happened," he said, "I guess we should just be grateful."

"Except that now El Presidente and his fascistas will feel like they can say and do anything they want, no matter how cruel, no matter how debased, because they have proved God really is on their side," I said. "Right?"

"I don't know," Dale said. "I can't follow the logic of the stories they spin. Their arguments have more twists than a bag full of pretzels."

"More breaks, too," I said.

"Psychotic breaks, maybe." Dale squinted into the mirror and then paused with the razor in mid-air. "Go away," he said. "I'm shaving. You're distracting me."

I left him in the bathroom, the president's speech still droning over the phone's tiny speaker.

***

A week later, as Dale helped Victor to the car – Victor's hand on his forearm, his other hand clutching his cane, his eyes fixed on the ground as he ventured each cautious step – I glanced at the evening sky. It was only six p.m. and the embers of sunset were fading away. Stars and a gibbous moon ranged in the sky.

Along with a handful of bright sparks – tiny white lights that somehow looked sharp, like splinters of glass.

Tiny lights that weren't actually so tiny, and that were getting bigger all the time.

An extrasolar planet, a scientist had said on a guerilla podcast the day before. An extrasolar planet that had broken up into thousands of pieces before it entered our solar system. Maybe it had passed through a couple of other solar systems along the way, had a few close encounters with gas giants. Maybe that's why it had shattered, its fragments stretching in a long train hundreds of millions of miles long. Ogden was the tip of a cosmic iceberg. The rest of the shattered planet was coming toward us in drips... in drabs... in clusters. More like swarms, actually.

And while some of those fragments, maybe most of them, were sure to miss us, it seemed improbable that none of them would hit the Earth. The question was how many would strike us, and how big they'd be, and how long we'd have between disasters.

Actually, the question was whether we would survive, and how long it might take us to die.

Dale glanced up, too. The bright, sharp shards were directly in Victor's line of sight, if he would only look up.

"Dad," Dale began.

Victor's tired, rheumy eyes searched the ground, looking for obstacles and pitfalls in the next few steps to the car. He didn't answer, focused on slowly making his way.

Finally, Victor was in the passenger seat. I got in the back, Dale got in the driver's seat, and then Dale began the process of getting his father buckled in.

Victor didn't protest. He seemed worn out today.

Dale fussed wordlessly with the buckle and clasp.

Victor peered out the windshield, turning his head slowly. "What's that?" he asked. "That knot of stars in the sky there?"

Of course he'd have heard nothing about the new swarm of asteroids. The right-wing news he listened to was still full of victorious stories about God turning Ogden away at the last minute, proving that man was still God's favorite thing in all creation, but implying, also, that we were sinners who needed strong governmental intervention to save us from ourselves... and from God's wrath.

Victor wouldn't have heard about the swarm of asteroids headed for Earth because Foax News and OnePatriot hadn't said a single word about it, and they weren't going to. They would, however, spend hours talking in detail about the restrictive new laws the government needed to pass if God were to remain appeased and benevolent.

"Is that a cloud?" Victor asked. "Is it that new space station that India put up?"

"No, dad," Dale sighed. "It's nothing. A smudge on the windshield. It's not even there. It's nothing at all."

Be here next week for the end of Season Six – a tale of apocalyptic apocrypha in which the rich and powerful have all vanished from the Earth, leaving a conflagration of panic and penance in their wake. But what if the Rapture is really more of a "Rupture"?