beyond the known world

We aren’t getting through this without a civil war, he wrote, one late October evening, head poking out from the hole he’d dug in the backyard. Stars hung low in the sky that night, big and bright. 

Prepare your mind, body, and spirit. He sat, breathing.

That’s just what NASA did on Monday, when a spacecraft was sent head first into an asteroid.

The explosion was symbolic, decked out,

Hot talked,

Self obliterated,

Completely!

And there were many, many, others watching, and holding onto each other, and waiting

It will be a bloody, and desperate fight, he continued, this time via text message. Brace yourselves.

Just then, Ex-wife slides the back door open, triggering automatic floodlight

I’m here to get the dog, she barks,

White light cast over him like a hand of god

Videos show

Slice of life shot

Time summons

Decades to follow

Ex-wife standing over hole now staring down at him praying

What the fuck are you— Texas oil wells of the AI age— doing?

Flicks finger at the sky and begs gravity to tug him up into it

This can’t be avoided, you know, the many dissolved into one?

She whistles for the dog, drives home to XM radio

He mumbles, pulls out shovel, digs himself deeper into the earth, still,

Then purchases thousands of dollars worth of tactical gear

Via Amazon

Shotguns, scopes, and night-vision devices,

It comes out later

All to be stashed

In a hotel in Virginia

The judge denied bail due to flight risk, cited the tunnels he built in his backyard specifically

That motherfucker and his mythology,

Ex-wife sits thinking, in Home Is Where The Heart Is condo

Winter creeping in like a thinning veil through cracked window

And Jupiter the dog twitching in his carpet sleep,

Dreaming of running

Beyond the known world