Sudden snow falls like rain. The lake freezes fish mid-swim, birds walking through slush. could be caught by hand.

Harvesters tending frostbitten fields of husks wear name tags for when death’s broker arrives.

An undertaker carves the last town treedown to a coffin before he dies, after the last pallbearer’s last gasp.

A waking child drowns in bed beside dehydrated family corpses who leaked excrement. They are yet dust.

God and his agent write this history as revision to his flood. Yet again, his rats survive.

A family of abject survivors are illiterate in the manners of distinguishing the dying from the dead, from death, or the Lord’s stubby bacilli from a drenching rain.