Asch’s Line Study in the Current Anthropocene

At the end of the world we saw the lines; the answers were so obvious. Sometimes we chose b, when the answer was c; we knew the answer was c, but everyone said b. With b there was the line that smiled, circled the inside of a hug, cut the sun in half on a lake so we could remind each other, in slow morning softness over coffee, that at least there was still sun today. With b, the line divided two-lane road trip highways between going back and forward, and sometimes there was caution. We could see the line was yellow, but faded yellow, and sometimes yellow was suggestion same way we’d never see our hands were red from disappearing ladybugs, the ones that weren’t collecting on our windshields. When the line was b, we kept driving; no one stopped for red. With b, the line was chalk, children’s drawings of a home on driveways, those little branches on a family tree, or the smile on the mouth of a boy with the tilt of your own childhood, going down even the reddest of slides just one more time. We didn’t choose c; we said that no one would. We didn’t choose c, as though our children’s children would still have woods to wander in, see what’s lovely in their dark and deep. When the line was shadow, dark and deep beneath our beds, we smelled the bedroom smell of one we loved and shut our eyes to everything not underneath the covers. We said we didn’t see it move, that line, the colour of a river, and fast as a river too. The line that moved became the water, what used to be a beach but ended, then wildfire cutting where the trees had ended, until the do not cut last spruce was cut a year ago. Of course we crossed that line; of course, we wouldn’t see it. Before the river in the sky became a mudslide, we stood for elevator talk about the weather as though we’d never tried to buy the rain, as though the rain was not canaries, slamming into windows. We chose, but stood in grocery lines and talked of whether, as though we could still choose a time to see, as though we’d get to choose when the power would go out.