And So It Begins

And so it begins, again, same as always: running.

He’s running, our unknown soldier, our unknown boy who looks suspiciously like me. That is to say, he looks like a non-descript brown-haired boy named Michael. And he’s running. But what is he running from?

The sky behind him is filled with clouds that are not clouds but thick black smoke. Lines of light whiz past him. Booms that sound like thunder, but are not thunder, fill the air.

Run. He’s running. I’m running. You’re reading, but with a little imagination maybe you are running as well. And:

Let’s look a little wider. Camera swings up and into a wide panorama. We are running across a battlefield. There is so many of us, we look like ants. The smoke-clouds glimmer at the edges with orange light cast by the fires.

Keep running. Keep running.

The earth lifts up behind us. It rolls up, like a carpet. A tsunami of dust and dirt overwhelms the sky and all is screams and the rumbling sound of the mechanical juggernauts and nothing else, nothing else.