Kirk Cameron, eat your heart out.

Zelda has a confession to make, Most Fashionable Reader. Zelda has many Secret Obsessions. One of Zelda’s Secret Obsessions, Most Fashionable Reader, is the Apocalypse — the horsemen trampling down the skies of fire Apocalypse, the holding in her hand a cup full of abominations Apocalypse, the foul spirits spewing forth from the gaping maw of the dragon Apocalypse. Zelda collects fashionable apocalyptic literature-in-fashionable-quotation-marks, and she is quite fond of her collection. Zelda views this collection as a reclamation of her childhood, as most of her early years were spent poring over tracts and pamphlets not unlike the ones she collects now, then squeezing her eyes shut as tightly as she could and praying please please please Jesus I have to be Raptured please please please Jesus don’t leave me down here with the Beast; memorizing the Book of Revelation, then furtively scanning the bodies of everyone she encountered for anything that could be interpreted as a Mark of the Most Unfashionable Beast, be it heart-shaped birthmark or bar-code tattoo; and waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night, then screaming PLEASE PLEASE O PLEASE JESUS PLEASE LET MY NAME BE WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF LIFE.

Needless to say, Dear Reader, Zelda’s childhood was fraught with paralyzing fear. Each time she cursed (and in those days, Most Fashionable Reader, cursing to Zelda was saying the word “butt”), each time she told a little white lie, each time she spoke out of turn in class, each time she told her older brother to just shut up and leave her alone, she envisioned a dreadfully stern and unsympathetic heavenly envoy dipping his hand-cut phoenix quill into an inkwell filled with the blackest of inks made from the burnt bones of the damned and using this inkstained quill to, with a solemnly dramatic flourish, strike her name from the Book of Life.

Zelda finally began to distance herself from her paralyzing fears when she was a freshman in college. A film was mentioned in passing in one of her religion classes, and Zelda, on a whim, rented it. She persuaded a Most Fashionable Friend of Fashion to watch it with her, so they sat on the carpet remnant on the floor of Zelda’s dorm room, surrounded by an Ansel Adams poster (belonging to Zelda’s Unfashionable Roommate), two pairs of Doc Martens (one belonging to Zelda, the other to her Most Fashionable Friend of Fashion), a Pulp Fiction poster (Zelda’s), a vase full of iridescent rocks (Unfashionable Roommate’s), a half-empty carton of Camel Lights (smoked surreptitiously by the window, as Zelda’s Roommate of Unfashion disliked it when Zelda smoked in the room), sorority sweatersets (Unfashionable Roommate’s), and a hunter green JCPenney twin comforter (unfortunately Zelda’s), and they began to watch the film. And their mouths dropped open in disbelief as soon as the film began. And their mouths stayed that way for the film’s entirety. The film? A Thief in the Night.

Kirk Cameron, eat your heart out. Left Behind’s got nothing on this:

Oh yeah! The poem!

The most recent addition to Zelda’s Fashionable Collection of Apocalyptic Literature-in-Quotation-Marks, a booklet entitled The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World by Hyman J. Appelman, was given to her a few months ago by a Most Fashionable Friend. Zelda has taken this booklet and created a cento, or a patchwork verse, from it. Zelda has taken liberties with punctuation, but no words have been changed.

All Things Shall Be Dissolved

I. The Failure of Science

Science has failed in trying to build a world.
It taught us if the world could only be,
all of the fearful evils would come to an end.
I am not decrying God. Here is the proof:
the leading scholars of the world
towered head and shoulders above the rest.
Synthetics, plastics, guided missiles, war.
Educated demons wrote a page.
An educated devil is terrible.
The houses of our land were so equipped.
War broke out. The generals: tried.
Science failed in trying to build a world.

II. The Faithfulness of Scripture

The atomic bomb is a revelation. It took
up the sword once. God got tired of it.
Where is the boasting that shook its fist to shout
around the world that it was peace? God got
tired of it. It took up the sword once too often.
The devastation in the moving pictures.
The wreckage and ruin is still terrible.
For miles there was nothing but ruin, corpses found.
Torn apart, the sword left its scabbard.
An ignoble end! The wages of sin!
The earth transformed by the last visitation.

III. The Future of the Saint and the Sinner

The rest of the lesson: prayers about the bombs.
Out to lunch: appetizers, bombs
for the salad, bombs for the main course,
mention of the bombs, tired despair.
The future of the saint: deliverance.
Deliverance from past, present, future.
There is also a word, but one word for you.
The bomb spells, preaches, proclaims DOOM.
The bleakness of DOOM! The blackness of DOOM!
The frightful curse, the terrible eternity of DOOM!