Factor Four Magazine: Issue 6 by Richard Flores IV

Author:Richard Flores IV
Language: eng
Format: epub

Butterfly of the Apocalypse

By Adam Gaylord

I close my eyes. The warm breeze smells of cut grass and I can hear children playing somewhere nearby. They laugh and scream, chasing one another in some game, unaware that they run headlong into oblivion.

We’d spent the better part of a lifetime studying them, the children, their parents, all peoples of this age. Two lifetimes really. The scope of the work was staggering: thousands of lives interacting in millions of ways. So many times we thought we’d found the pivotal relationship, the key to undoing the future, our future, the one we came from.

Our attempts were subtle at first. A well timed sneeze, a bump on the subway, a brief conversation. When nothing worked we escalated. From one night stands to assaults. In time, we got desperate. Stolen cars, arson, kidnappings, eventually murder. I'd killed so many. Nothing changed. We couldn’t find the pivot point. Our mission continued to fail.

We gave up. We’d certainly done our best. No one could say otherwise. Besides, we were in love. We decided to live our lives and, for a time, we were happy. As long as we kept our heads down and the TV off. But it’s hard to stay completely ignorant. Every once in a while we’d hear about something we’d been taught about as children, an event leading up to the beginning of the end. Ultimately it became too much. She was hardly sleeping and I’d started drinking. We couldn’t sit by and watch the apocalypse. We had to try again.

We approached the situation differently this time around. Rather than working on events from the outside, we got involved. She got political. I got revolutionary. She cajoled, I threatened. She pressed hands, I broke fingers. She drafted legislation, I blackmailed to secure votes. We were active, engaged, and in the end, we were failures. Nothing changed.

But we pressed on, then I pressed on. What choice did I have? She's gone. It’s been over a year. Cancer. I'm old, although it's hard to say how old. Older than I should be. I'm dying. I’m out of time. Humanity’s out of time.

Now I stand before the answer. It’s a beautiful day, sunny and calm. The tranquility is lost on me. My focus is solely on my prey.

The tools I've chosen to save humanity seem absurdly simple. A homemade net made out of a broom handle, a pillowcase, and a wire clothes hanger. The design straight out of a children's book.

I approach the patch of flowers slowly. Dandelions. If I flush my prey, I'm too slow to catch up. My knees are terrible.

The web of events is almost impossibly complex. The beat of a wing, a diversion of air, distraction, missed connections, panic, death, a ripple in the fabric of history. It should be enough. It had to be.

I raise the net with a little prayer I don’t believe in and swoop it down over the insect, genuinely surprised in my success. I bundle up the pillowcase and hobble over to my killing station.

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