the end

The Catholic Church three blocks behind my house is setting off fireworks.

Flashes and bangs, fizzing and popping, and incessant sparkling and snapping are taking over the neighborhood.

The night sky is alive and angry with a melee of overlapping, mismatching, clashing, tacky, neon lights.

This Sunday marks the end of the bazaar.

Growing up, a Jew from out of town, I was completely unaware of the Catholic Church’s love affair of 50/50 raffles, fried dough, and Chinese auctions.

Only after moving to Pittsburgh I learned that the annual bazaar is where you eat fried Oreos in the name of Christ and gamble in praise of the Lord.

My dad, a Jew from out of town, remarks that he’s surprised the city allows this tiny neighborhood church to set off such considerable fireworks considering there are trees everywhere.

We stand side by side on the deck. We slowly shift back and forth, from right to left foot, in sync, clearly an inherited behavior. I pause our marching so I can rest my head on his shoulder.

My parents are heading back home tomorrow morning and I already miss them.

In between the dazzling lights and explosive pulsing you can see the echoes of the fireworks, my favorite part.

Echoes are the blurred grey shadows only visible when one firework flares out, right before another erupts.

These echoes form daunting figures in the night sky; taking the shape of an enormous ghostly rib cage, of charcoal tentacles etched in the blackness above my house, a colorless collection of long spidery legs unfurling and taking over every angle of the sky.

I like these phantom murky afterthoughts, these inky shapes absent of color.

I like reconfiguring their outlines in my mind so I see nothing but the leftover bones of dusty skeletons, catching them before the smog bleeds out into the emptiness of the atmosphere.

I’ve always preferred these cloudy echoes to the scratchy gold, purple, pink, and green pipe cleaner shaped fireworks thrown predictably, uncreatively, and haphazardly into the night sky.

I take a deep breath, sizing up my small backyard and the patch of sky above my house, where every other night the only things we see are the silhouettes of trees, power lines, and occasionally bats, which I intentionally refer to as “birds” to make me feel less creeped out. It’s surprising how well that works.

My mother, husband, and two dogs stay inside. My husband doesn’t give a shit about fireworks and my dogs are hiding beneath his chair and between his legs, but I hear my mom say something like, “impressive for such a tiny church!”

Soon enough their sounds start to sizzle softer and softer and their bright colors fade to dishwater black and grey and soon enough there’s not enough light to see the smoke fueled creature that’s wrapped its echoing talons possessively around my neighborhood.

My husband looks up from his book, “they do this every year.”

But I know that it’s the end of the world.

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