I am going to tell you. I am going to explain to you, now, the theory of everything. Every scripture will point to it, every Thus Saith, every Behold. To me, they are trumpets, neither still or small, and they tell me: Make Ready. From the foundations of the world, from before its bricks were set from mud, I was your father, and you were my daughter. So:

Lo! The world is full of black robes, covering the truth, snuffing out candlesticks. They carry their knowledge in thimbles. They say green, but they mean orange.

Daughter: do you hear your husband? Be the wool of the sheep, warm and silent.

Be the fencepost, not the hinge.

Here is your future: we have our stores for us and you, we have stores for looters (every old thing has its purpose), we have guns and propane.

Once, we played together in a tent your mother made, your arms around my neck. But you grew older, your ears dull and your back stiff, you had no warmth for your Dad, only bristle and burr. Our home was a henhouse full of clucks, and no one woke to my crow, and this is not the Order of Things!

And I was the voice of warning to your Husband, your Head, when he asked for your hand, I prophesied for him my past, his future: carbuncles, thistles, broken glass.

Listen! the Priesthood speaks. I tell you, the sky will fall in great heaps of plaster! It is time for shuttering, for reaping, for the whirlwind.

Elizabeth Cranford Garcia

 

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