That's the way the Wookie mumbles.

It was 1772, somewhere just outside of present-day Moscow. Catherine the Great had been declared an enlightened despot because Voltaire was trying to get in her pants (or dress, as was the cultural norm of the period, women's pants being an innovation not perfected until the early 1980's). Sitting on the banks of the Dneiper River (in Ukraine, not Russia, but on the cosmic scale 'just outside of Moscow') was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, taking a respite from the scorching heat of North Africa until his chronic stomach ailments subsided somewhat. He looked over and commented on the beauty of the Smoky Mountains, shrouded in mist like the evaporating piss of a thousand drunks on Bourbon Street. Not an exact quote, but it's hard to translate accurately from the original German.

The afternoon was unusually pleasant for that time of year, penetrating cold giving way to a seemingly exothermic heat, growing from the chest cavity in such abundance as to warm the whole landscape, an internal well-spring of Spring. Alfred E. Smith idled in the shade of a Japanese Maple, sipping tequila and whistling excerpts from the theme from MASH between swigs. Smith was an avatar of Vishnu, but the godhead spent most of his time dropping slanderous diatribes about FDR into the middle of divine revelations, so any actual wisdom he conveyed met with indifference on the part of those gathered around. Yagyu Munenori pointed out that even after a day and several bottles worth of various liquors, Vishnu cum Smith didn't seem drunk at all, but the facade of mortality took on a hollow nature, like the transcendent self was seeping through the pores and dripping into puddles of sweat infinitely deep. Tiny oceans, surfed upon by a microscopic race of Australians, granted eternal life by some special quality of the divine perspiration. Munenori hadn't shut up about Australians since his recent trip to Sydney.

There was an explosion just over the horizon. A bright flash seemed to ripple through the atmosphere, sending fingers of white through particularly refractive portions of the night sky. In the opposite direction, a 1967 Pontiac GTO convertible (blue) crested the hill and its stacked headlights blinked into existence a pair at a time. A little nearer and to the right, wearing a Speedo, unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt and a sun-brittled hat woven from palmetto fronds, Jan Oort combed the beach with a metal detector and a flashlight (he said he was looking for his shoes). Closest and to the left, Freeman Gosden chatted busily away on a cell phone, his face lit to an otherworldly green by the glowing display. A lonely woman (perhaps the one referenced in the Ornette Coleman song) sat a few inches deep in the loose sand, sketching pornographic caricatures of whoever was in the current issue of People magazine. She waved an exasperated hand at the full moon directly above, and complained about the lack of light.

Clifford Brown had just spent 72 dollars on a cupcake. Brilliant white icing. Rainbow sprinkles, but without the pink ones (carefully removed with tweezers by a castrati basso profundo, working menial jobs since the depression hit and it became abundantly clear to the music world that opera was a luxury). Eating a similar cupcake, but one with all sprinkles still in tact, Sergei Prokofiev waved for a waiter, also a eunuch (every employee was a eunuch, except for the host, a hermaphrodite). Quickly, a waiter strode over and without further prompting wiped a dab of the white frosting from Prokofiev's nose using a silk necktie stolen the previous night from an 8-year-old French pop star (hit song: Lent Mort ). In the corner sat a young man with a fishbowl and a calf, gazing with confusion and disappointment upon the sizable surf-n-turf recently delivered to his table. The little bovine let out a series of lows in iambic pentameter. Five Franciscan friars were taking advantage of the Karaoke machine, belting out the best of Elvis Costello in Gregorian chant. Four barbers waited impatiently in the corner opposite man-with-fish-and-calf. The house Mariachi band was silent.

The sky ripped open, and the booming voice of Slim Whitman heralded the coming apocalypse. Fire rained from the sky in sheets of marigold and crimson. The ground tore asunder, and out poured devils dripping with lava, melting the flesh of those unfortunate enough to be near them. Charred skeletons danced in time to the trembling of the Earth. It was a lovely day for a walk in the park. Birds sang in every tree, creating a cacophonic accompaniment to the 72-degree, gentle northeasterly breeze, partly cloudy with a chance of evening showers day. The birdsong stopped abruptly, replaced by the flutter of a thousand wings as the birds fled to the safety of the sky, and the trees were uprooted, falling like dominoes somehow rigged to trigger another random domino instead of the next in line, so that the sequence revealed no pattern. Swooping back from the heavens, with the generally stupid look of birds replaced by a pure malice that burned red in their eyes, and squawking violently instead of singing mournfully of Springs past, the songbirds, recruited by Whitman, or Whitman's employer (as the hierarchy of the Armageddon cannot be assumed simply from the messenger) pecked the flesh from everyone in the park. The skeletons were crushed by falling trees, but the snapping of bones was drowned out by the more thunderous sounds associated with the end of all things. Sprinting barefoot and loin-clothed around a field of lush grass, a Spartan and an Athenian tossed a Frisbee, pausing occasionally to drink from bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Once, when the wind carried the disc high into the branches of a nearby live oak, a clown on stilts was kind enough to retrieve it for them, before he went back to making balloon-phalli (a very simple procedure) for the children ordering ice cream from a trained ice cream-serving monkey. Hippies played hackie sack. Evening set on the city.