The End Has Come

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF THE PROMISED LAND Robin Wasserman

“So it was, and so it is written:

And fire rained from the sky, and Abraham died, and all his brethren, and all that generation of the world were burned away.”

Isaac had really thought writing the bible would be easier.

“And Isaac saved the children of Abraham and led them to the promised land.

And Isaac took Julia and Ellen for his wives and begat Joseph and Thomas.

And Joseph begat Simon who begat Noah and Reuben and Thomas begat Paul and Israel and Luke. And the children of Abraham were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and the land was bountiful, and the LORD was pleased and gave them his favor, and the children of Abraham filled the land.”

The scribe falls silent, waiting; Isaac keeps his eyes closed, lets the words echo. Steeples his gnarled hands, draws a rasping breath, hocks up the phlegm.

Life is phlegm, now. Most likely death will be, too, a slow drowning in his own bed, gurgling and frothing. A death unfit for a patriarch. A voice, now, unfit for a patriarch, this phlegmy croak, but the scribe is of no use either, his thin warble that of a boy still proud of the peach fuzz on his balls, trying to prove himself to the sovereign Father. Failing.

“Again,” Isaac snaps, and the boy, with his stuttering rhythm, reads back the morning’s work.

And Isaac saved the children of Abraham.

And the children of Abraham filled the land.