The Five-dollar Apocalypse

Meriwether Stout entered the fortuneteller’s small studio on a lark, for he didn’t believe in crystal balls, astrology, or tarot. He was a bookkeeper, a clerk who juggled numbers the way a circus clown juggles balls. He’d never dropped a nine or a six—not any number—for he was a model of circumspection and rationality. But when Madame Zoya touched his arm, he felt a jolt of electricity jump through his veins and then burrow into the very marrow of his forty-year-old bachelor bones. For a brief moment, he felt his skull had been rendered into a photographic negative.

“The years will be unkind,” Madame Zoya told him. “That’ll be five bucks, mister.”

On the street again, Meriwether was flustered and checked his pocket watch to find an anchor in the temporal, green-ledger universe. The timepiece had mysteriously gained three hours. The five-billion-year-old sun was lower in the sky, and the shadows of pedestrians looked unnaturally long and ominous. Nearly everyone looked long in the tooth.

He walked on and glanced at his pocket watch again. The minute hand was spinning wildly, like a third base coach waving a runner home. Building facades cracked, and ivy tore great fissures in the sidewalk like tendrils of sentient, malevolent rope. Cars grew rusty, sagging on reddish-brown axles that had not spun into gear for eons.

Meriwether was nonplused, which is to say his brain was experiencing a minus for the first time in his Newtonian world of rational, balanced numbers. He glanced up to see the glacier, a mile high, scraping its way down Broadway.

He did no snap out of a trance or awaken from a nightmare. The years had indeed been unkind.

Picture: public domain.

Mandelbaum the Astrologer

At forty-two, Ozzie Mandelbaum spent his days pouring over zodiacal charts, correlating his findings with eclipses and conjunctions and planetary alignments. He sometimes gazed into tealeaves for extra inspiration. He even wore a tall, conical hat emblazoned with moons and stars—with Pisces, Capricorn, Libra—plus his lucky two-dollar bill and various campaign buttons. He could afford to endlessly gaze into the heavens after inheriting a family fortune built on the manufacture of feather dusters. It was on a warm April evening when Ozzie gazed at his detailed star maps and leaned back in his chair, his eyes wide with disbelief. He was horrified to learn that Jupiter’s position relative to Orion meant that he had died five years earlier.

“If I am dead, I shall go forth from my apartment and walk the streets until I gradually dissolve into the ether of the cosmos,” he mumbled. “The universe will surely correct its mistake.”

On his second day of aimless wandering, Ozzie entered the Natural Museum of History and stared at the beautiful young woman reflecting on the Cretaceous period. She was a vision of soft skin and dark, shiny hair more lustrous than the Pleiades. Ozzie approached her and made small talk. He was powerless as he stood in the gravity of this newly discovered star.

That night, Ozzy and his star woman danced and drank wine and laughed. He kissed her hair and lips as she nibbled Ozzy ear and stroked his cheek. Somewhere in the solar system, Jupiter edged away from Orion by a few degrees, not daring to spoil the resurrection of Ozzy Mandelbaum. Sometimes, celestial mechanics has a heart.

Pic—public domain

The Original Sin of Biff Penfield

Biff Penfield had been warned by his fraternity brothers not to go out with Nebula, the vixen from Chi Delta Chi, a sorority rumored to be aligned with the Dark Arts. Hazing was one thing, but Nebula was considered to be bad mojo. Some of the boys she dated disappeared or flunked out of school.

Biff was game for anything, however. He’d heard that Nebula had erotic charms that were known only to certain Chinese concubines. How could he pass up the invitation to go swimming at her father’s deserted mansion on Long Island?

Nebula slowly descended the steps in the shallow end, violet eyes sparkling beneath long, jet-black hair. The tattoo of a snake writhed from her navel up to her left shoulder, circled her neck, and fell upon her right breast in serpentine fashion.

Biff, wearing nothing but the designer clothes given him by Mother Nature, treaded water in the deep end and watched Nebula swim toward him using—what else?—a sultry breast stroke that was slow and mesmerizing.

Biff felt intense waves of ecstasy before everything went dark. His left leg was behind his neck, and his hands had somehow become entwined around the thighs of Nebula, who hung upside down in the blue water, her body straight as an arrow aimed at the underworld. And then he was unconscious, Nebula disappearing into a black maelstrom beneath the diving board.

“Well, what happened?” asked Biff’s frat buddies as they stood around his hospital bed. “What did she do?”

“I’m not sure,” Biff replied, “but if I don’t get the tattoo of this snake lasered off my chest and shoulders, my parents are gonna kill me.”

Biff lived an ordinary life in the years ahead, but on certain moonless nights when the tide was high, he found himself scratching his chest and shoulders. Temptation not rebuffed has a way of leaving an indelible mark, even if unseen …

… not unlike the taste of a forbidden apple lingering on the palate of mankind, which must forever swim in a pool of regret while searching for a lifeguard on a tall wooden platform.


Pic—public domain