HOW TO SPEND YOUR TIME BEFORE THE RENEGADE PLANET MAKES IT ALL GO DARK — JUSTIN LAWRENCE DAUGHERTY
/Cover your tulips for the freeze. Tell your lover, this is not the end. Ask for a raise at your mid-level job. Count the stars, as many as you can, for the first time. Sip, slowly, good bourbon. Your lover will not want to go home, but there is too little time to love. Take your lover’s hand and say, let’s not forget to neglect each other. Face the inevitable, but not the bulb in the sky. Your lover will stand outside your door, window, apartment. Erase all unspoken messages. Take a walk as far as you can, turn around. Don’t answer the phone; your lover will want to tell you futures. Forget what miracles or heroes movies tell you will emerge from ruin. Go away from home and enter strangers’ front doors. Miss a flight and forget it. In the sky, the planet will seem an augury. Lose your keys. Set your home on fire with everything inside but you. Pay no attention to the media’s panic. Leave your lover with a motive to find you. Ask if life in space can see yours ending. Get lost. Commit a minor crime. Ask your lover to send you a postcard. It doesn’t matter that it will never arrive. What matters is: what is written is meant only for you. What matters is: you’ll never know what endings you missed.
Justin Lawrence Daugherty lives in Atlanta, where is the Co-Publisher of Jellyfish Highway Press. He manages and founded Sundog Lit, co-pilots Cartridge Lit, and is the Fiction Editor at New South.
