'This Crumbling Pageant'

Lynda E. Rucker's contribution to The Far Tower: Stories for W.B. Yeats has an epigram from 'The Second Coming'. 'The darkness drops again' sets the tone for a story about a family having a summer holiday during what may well be the end of the world.

'The news had been bad all day.' So begins the story proper, with Astrid and her kinfolk vacationing by the Mississippi, but obsessively checking their phones for news updates. Astrid happens to find a book in their rented house, a work about Yeats and the Golden Dawn. Her cousin confuses them with the far-right Greek political party, and the poet's dalliance with fascism is inevitably raised. Astrid prefers to focus on automatic writing,

We learn that, since childhood, Astrid has been a visionary - someone who can see the 'thin places' in our reality where something more intense, more really real, breaks through. She succeeds in producing automatic writing on her sketchpad, but cannot bear to read it, insists her brother throw it away.

This is not a story with a climax, a simple pay-off, but offers instead a meditation on the all-too-plausible end to all things human. What precisely is happening is not defined, but it doesn't really need to be. When you're done, you're done. Astrid keeps thinking about the astronauts in the ISS. 'When and how would they learn that the cataclysm had arrived?'

While I was impressed by the story, I wish it had not been so obviously necessary to write it. But here we are. And that was the penultimate story. Next up, a tale by another early contributor to ST, Reggie Oliver.