A New Year

That Day, the moon fell from the sky. A giant ball of rock

Flaming, piercing through the sky like a sharpened sword,

All the animals stopped and

stared as it hurtled towards the ground

Waiting,  hearts pounding, to find what would happen

And nothing ever looked like it would be here tomorrow

But we didn’t notice it because

That day—the day the moon fell—by some coincidence,

Was the day that sewers rose in revolution

And the mice struck with swiss-cheese swords,

in seemingly every city,  

Charging capriciously at all our institutions,

Eventually engaging all manner of bombs and blasts

But we did not notice it because

On the moon fall day, which was the mice revolt, came the

Horrors also. The oceans rose as every window showed

Cthulhu careening through the clouds carrying tidings

of devastation, while the fish people voraciously ate

All the animals who could

Not get far enough away, and then the elder Gods flew out

But we did not see them coming because

On the moon-falling-mice-revolting-Cthulhu-calling

day the pages jumped off the books

And the Ogres and Orcs and Oliphaunts came up

Setting benches and bridges and blocks alight

With dragons and dactyls and dwarfs 

and little small hobbits with swords

While the Tuatha de Danann rose up 

From the ground with their silver spears shining.

But we had no idea of any of this because

That day, the flaming moon day the mice day

The Cthulhu calling day, the day 

the stories came to life

And the sun exploded and the universe collapsed, the day

All oceans dried, all continents flooded, the day the

Trees exploded, their bark spewed

like shrapnel into the air, the day

Aliens, drunk and muddled, hitchhiked from bars,

And all the buildings collapsed, the day

Ice started burning as fire froze, the Krampus day,

The hooded robes and starships carrying

all of the Jedi day

And no one noticed any of this because

We were all holding out in our homes, not doing anything,

Not even watching, not really, but 

Waiting for a clock to strike

As the end rewound to begin again. 

After “The Day the Saucers Came” by Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders, published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2007.

Sebastian Cynn

(CW: Death, Child neglect/abuse; could be read as implied suicide)