We sat in the cool splendor of the evening grass on the lawn near Joanne’s dormitory under the shade of an Atlantic white cedar and the wind was soft and cool like the grass and the sun had just begun to set and the light was golden and spread wide across the expanse of the New Hampshire horizon in the early autumn of 1962.

Joanne had prepared a picnic basket that lay on its side and the uncut loaf of French bread and the apples and pears and pre-cut kiwi and a small bottle of German pinot gris had all tumbled out onto the small pale blue blanket that we had spread across the grass under the Atlantic cedar and when I looked at Joanne she smiled and looked away and then I looked away and I could feel myself blush and the wind picked up and the branches above us moved and creaked, but only for a moment, and I turned back to Joanne and I could feel the flush draining from my face and I felt confident and masculine and I reached over and cradled the back of her small head, the silkiness of her long brunette hair against my sweating palm, and I kissed her and  pressed my lips hard against hers and then I pulled away briefly to catch my breath and then we kissed again, only this time it was much longer, and soon it was apparent that Joanne was kissing me as hard as I was kissing her, and I knew we both wanted it to be soft and elegant and slow, but we also wanted to eat one another alive, our lust was so painfully strong, and when we opened our eyes it was darker and the horizon was no longer golden but heavy and gray like winter chimney smoke and before I could tell Joanne that I loved her the wolf had its teeth in her neck, her porcelain skin illuminated by the moonlight, its unblemished innocence torn by feral fangs, blood streaming down in rivulets from her broken neck, and I watched in abject terror as this animal peeled away her flesh so effortlessly and exposed her organs and entrails in such a way that I can never look at another human being again without first imagining them turned inside out, veins and bones and blood and flesh and muscle in the rawest form, organs pulsating, everything that makes us all essentially the same creatures beneath the well-groomed scrim—everything created by the God who for some reason spared me, the wolf not so much as sniffing in my direction after Joanne’s body had been mauled and mangled into a twisted mass of carnage that no longer resembled a human being and could no longer give the wolf any reason to stay, its entire snout red with blood, its eyes a piercing but nonetheless satiated bright yellow, its stomach nearly dragging against the ground as it limped back into the woods (the wolf had become so wildly ravenous during the attack that it had torn off a piece of its own hind leg) with a belly full of Joanne and even some of her blood-soaked clothing, and I can remember feeling rather frozen, even perplexed, though I was still able to tear off a piece of the French bread loaf and wash it down with the German pinot gris and after that, I fell into a deep sleep.

Is this all part of God’s plan?  I asked myself this when I awoke the next morning, the remains of Joanne’s mangled body beginning to emanate an ineffably bad stench, flies already buzzing about the carcass and depositing maggot eggs in what was left of the ripped up flesh, that nearly caused me to vomit as I stumbled away from where we had sat so peacefully the evening before under the cool shade of the Atlantic cedar, and soon I was running, and if the Alfa wouldn’t have started, I swear I could have run all the way back to Andover, all the way back to Phillips Academy, to the safety of my dormitory, where eventually I briefly mourned and prayed and asked God why Joanne had to die like that.

And the answer I received was that it was part of a plan—part of a much larger plan that is so vast in scope that mere humble mortals could not even begin to conceive its immense gravity, and certainly this plan is so overwhelming, so immeasurably magnificent, that even attempting to grasp on to the rare visible vestige will surely result in blindness and deafness—terminal illness, perhaps—and ultimately death.

So I agreed to accept that Joanne’s death was only the beginning of something much larger; something that fate would indeed unfold to me over time.  And when I learned that Joanne’s brother, our class president, was so devastated by his sister’s brutal death, that he left Phillips Academy in a straight jacket on a stretcher, which required me, as vice president, to step up and take the reigns and become the decider, that this, too, was part of God’s plan, and I anticipated that several events would occur in the coming years, some of them pleasant, enlightening, revelatory in nature, though many of them so horrific that our family made certain the public would be protected from knowing any of the gruesome details, and to this day these events have been sealed or burned, all of them in some way wiped away clean from our nation’s history—at least we hope this is true, and the effort put forth was to the best of our combined abilities.

It has been several months now since I left office, and while a long series of tragic events have put our country on the brink, the beginnings of which occurred during the very infancy of my presidency, I am absolutely certain, as always, that these events are God’s will; and it is the will of God that will ultimately prevail and provide us with considerably better times, and we will begin to see how the seeds we all so painstakingly sowed will finally become the robust foliage of promise that will indeed bear such hopeful fruit and feed this great nation until all is well once again, and the general populace will be healthy and happy and compliant—as reluctant to question the vastly underappreciated work carried out by my administration as they will the divine work of the Almighty himself.

And our planet will thus become whole as it was at the start of creation, and the rich will become richer, and the poor will wash away with the debris of the hurricanes, and we will have compassion for our neighbors, because our neighbors will look like us, talk like us, and act like us, and all will be willing to accept the second coming, and as a nation united we will watch with not terror but with respect and great awe as the entire universe collapses and implodes into the dust that will settle into the infinite space into which God will again one day reach his mighty hand and create that which had been our birthright just as much as the subsequent inhabitants of the post-apocalypse, and to Jesus I give praise, and I let go and let God.  Amen.