The Beast

Your Early Morning Freewrite

We knew things were bad when the heat began to rise and stayed rising.

The streets started to melt underneath our feet, black sticky, smoky tar that we couldn’t get from underneath our fingernails. Cars began to pop and sputter like popcorn in a metal cage. Stores boarded up their windows to keep out the sun, too, keep in the AC until they closed down entirely. The higher-ups told us the warmth was seasonal, that it would pass, that we were more robust than Mother Nature and Her wrath.

It only got worse.

The birds in the sky stopped flying. The oceans — beyond what anyone had read in the bible or science fiction — began to bubble. Pet cemeteries became irrelevant as crop fields burned. Fishes in their bowls boiled. Bears no longer came out of their caves. Rivers ran dry. The forests fell black and decimated. The sky ran blood red-orange as it clashed with the sun, some days blotching its light out for weeks on end.

The heat continued to rise.

What was this period in Earth’s timeline? What was this moment in humanity? Was it true what they said:

The beast you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast because it was and is not and is to come.

Then came the months of rage. At first, no one knew what caused the fury of anger that overtook some people’s minds. The news blamed it on poverty, on politics, on race, culture, cell phones, unemployment, wealth disparity — the list goes on and on and on. Mother nature was indifferent, and the heat slowly took our minds and our bodies.

“We have found evidence for increases in aggression and violent behavior in controlled settings when study subjects were exposed to high temperatures,” one study claimed. “Participants demonstrated an increase in the joy of destruction when subject to increasing ambient temperatures.”

The foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast unless we can stop ourselves from becoming so.

Mitchell Duran is a writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He has been published in Black Horse Review, Drunk Monkey, The Millions, BrokeAssStuart, and more. He lives in San Francisco, California. Find more work at Mitchellduran.com