The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Family Night: An Apocalypse ca. 2004

“If you believe in God, then intellectually, you cannot believe in man-made global warming. You must be either agnostic or atheistic to believe that man controls something he cannot create.”
– Rush Limbaugh

Watching a tsunami sweep across
Indonesia on TV in real time
Scotoptic-vision Scud missiles
soaring over Baghdad while
a Kevlar vested Brian Williams
nods on the screen and responds
several seconds too late.
Dad got us Little Caesars
and Kroger Brand ice cream
on his way home from work.
It’s Monday night: family night.
Piles of shirts, pants, socks,
canned and dehydrated food
splayed out on the gray carpet,
clothes missing their raptured bodies
in the living room. We’re preparing
for the Second Coming
of Jesus Christ by filling backpacks
full of non-perishable food and outfits
to last us for 72-hours while
dad talks about moving
to Jackson County, Missouri:
the supposed, exact, and prophesied
point of all human convergence
the Garden of Eden
the gathering place of God’s elect
at the Savior’s triumphal return.
And mom murmurs something
about how Al Gore is crazy,
fearmongering, saying that we are causing
natural disasters. If they’re natural, how
can we be causing them?
Can you believe that crap?
And we don’t. We nod in common assent.
Our hands dutifully stuff the backpacks
we’ll leave hanging in the mudroom
for six months, a year, then two and more
until the food expires,
until we outgrow all the clothes,
still folded and unfilled with our
flesh, until the house caves in
around our bleached and brittled bones.

Jace Einfeldt is a writer from Southern Utah. He is the fiction editor for The Arkansas International. His recent work has appeared in Southwest Review, BULL, HAD, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.

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