To Those Who Are Perishing

A strange figure that has always been there but never seen appears just then, green bottle flies tangled in her long, witchy hair and patches of brown mold staining her forehead and chin. She knows our names, our secrets, knows our thoughts before we even think them. Those she has invisibly visited have perished miserably from Alzheimer’s and tumors and in shopper stampedes. The science of it can be debated later, when cold black stars pinwheel across the sky and the moon flies up like a clown shot out of a cannon. In the meantime, today’s rain falls on yesterday. We grow old surrounded by clocks.