'The New Year' by Gary Fincke

Clusters of Christmas lights are reflected on our neighbors’ plastic Santa. On television, the year loses its minutes like a villain’s hidden bomb until they appear, rifles ready, their yard going brilliant with spotlights. The wife, heavy with pregnancy, names the seconds from her wrist. We watch and wonder as they exhaust their ammunition on the sky before rain sweeps them to a car port’s cover. 

They stand until the motion sensor forgets them. Santa’s stomach glows red and green. My wife says she’s read that the particular light shining upon a pregnant belly can affect the future of the fetus within.

“That sounds more faith than science,” I murmur, and, for now, don’t say, The Greenland ice sheet has entered a constant state of loss, a discovery that means our grandchildren might experience the end of civilization, the data so dire and irrefutable that I hope shooting the sky might bring on a long, January freeze.

Our neighbors disappear inside. Somebody, I say, not scientifically, has predicted the world will end like a New Year’s celebration, circling the globe toward us from New Zealand. I do not say that our fifth year of accepting housecleaning, lawn care, and weekly delivery of groceries suggest another kind of end.

What awful mail the old, like us, receive--envelopes and cards addressed to Boxholder and Resident; the Penny Saver, charity solicitations, a stream of scams from medicine, religion, and bargain home repair.

Our street’s cul-de-sac curls between the houses of two other elderly couples who receive the newspaper in logoed boxes. Some mornings, I see those men retrieving that thinned, stricken bundle of folded newsprint. Always, despite the cold, they pause to scan the front page as if greedy for good news. I fire my finger-gun skyward and wish everyone well.

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Gary Fincke's latest collection of flash fiction In the Light and Dark will be published in August by Pelekinesis Press. He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.