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him a lot. I couldn’t remember a face or the sound of his voice. I was a baby when he died, for Chrissakes. If I did try hard to remember him I heard music in my head; a powerful music that went soaring upward; in my imagination I’d see a shadow that sort of filled the room. For a while I’d imagine this was my father returning as my guardian angel.
    Well, things moved on. My mother went on to enjoy other relationships with men, but nothing lasting. One of these resulted in the birth of my sister. I never associated her as the daughter of another man. He’d moved on, never to be seen again. Nor did I kid myself that this was a virgin birth.
    Chelle was noisy as hell. I have to say that. For a long time I wasn’t bowled over with sharing a house with a sister. But within a few years we learnt to get on well together. And so we grew up—Mom, Chelle and me in a small house in a small New Jersey town. Mom worked long, loooong hours for a marketing company. Cash tended to be on the scant side. The cars we owned always had a nice rust bloom running ’round the wheel arches. Life ran to normal enough schedules—school, vacations, Christmas, birthdays. Nothing earthquaking. Apart from the Chunk episode that I mentioned a while back.
    In fact the whole world ran to its normal schedule. Of course it wasn’t a fairy tale of peace and prosperity. Worldwide there were the usual wars, famines, floods, hurricanes, droughts, stock market implosions, political assassinations, revolutions, treaty signings—you name it. You’ve seen all that stuff on TV. It wasn’t pretty, but for Planet Earth and humankind it was business as usual.
    As all that stuff happened I quit school, flipped a finger at college and found work at the local airport (yes, brothers and sisters, I was the guy who tossed your suitcases onto the conveyor belt that fed the carousels). As movie stars partied on Oscar night, as farmers worked their land, as politicians cut their deals and as people like me and you ordered pizza in time for our favorite medical drama, or shopped, or ground away at homework or at our day jobs, or slept in our beds, something unusual was happening. Something so unusual, something so out of the ordinary, nobody noticed at the time. Or at least if they did they shut it out of their minds.
    My job here in Sullivan is to make sure everyone’s got enough firewood for the cooking stoves they’ve now got sitting out in their backyards. Part of that job is to collect all the old newspapers I can find, so they can light their fires in the first place. During the winter nights I found myself reading them. At first it was just something to do; then for no real reason I started hunting down news stories that described the early stages of . . . hell! Let’s make no bones about it, the disaster. And I should spell the word in great, menacing black letters:
    DISASTER
    So I clipped reports from newspapers as blizzards turned the world white outside.
    I’ve only started putting them into some kind of order. At the time they didn’t point to any kind of global disaster or apocalypse (yeah, apocalypse is a good word). They were the kind of thing you glanced at, thought, “Well that’s pretty strange,” then turned to the TV pages and forgot all about them. But it’s there, all right. Like the little drops of blood in your handkerchief. That’s nothing, you tell yourself. A few drops of blood. I only blew my goddam nose too hard, didn’t I? But if only it was true. Those few specks of red in your tissue are the start of something BIG. A something that could be a freshly budding tumor in your lungs that will eat you alive.
    These clippings were whispers of events just around the corner. As the man said: “Coming events cast their shadows before.”
    Take this one. It has a nice, cheesy title: GENESIS OF CALAMITY . Another Bible-sounding title could have been HERE COMES THE FLOOD . There are plenty like this that hint at what was on its