Vignette by Jim Jepps

For weeks there had been a problem.
The weather was going haywire.
The Moon was drawing closer.
The MOON! Drawing closer!
The Earth’s very orbit had begun to wobble
and no one could predict the tides.

What the hell was going on?
All the world’s top scientists rallied to the cause.
They looked up to space, they explored the oceans.
They delved into the deepest mines.
More and more urgent,
more and more frantic.

And then there it was.
They found the cause at last.
The origin. The genesis.
In a little village in Essex they found him.
His name was Little Jay,
the fearsome cause of the cataclysm.

It was all his fault, Little Jay.
Michael Gove pointed out that this may never have happened
Had we never joined the EU.
Jeremy Corbyn’s brother said it showed climate change wasn’t man made.
It was all the fault of this stupid little boy,
so people, understandably, wrote angry letters.

They wrote them in shaky hands as the Earth wiggled.
They wrote them even as they got sea sick from the jiggling.
All the while the Moon loomed ever larger overhead.
Even as they shook their fists the seas rose up.
Heaving themselves up, swelling with hunger,
thickening with desire and hurt.

Naturally people wondered what could be done.
They asked themselves what retribution they could take?
ITV stepped in, deciding to broadcast a live apology from Little Jay.
Perhaps that would do some good.
Iain Duncan Smith scolded him, asking did he realise what he had done?
There had been a blip on the stock exchange – that’s right. A blip.

Mr Iain Duncan Smith whispered that there were “real concerns” about Muslims.
They might use the Moon’s wonky orbit as a cunning distraction.
Dancing through the Eurostar passport booths unassaulted.
Little Jimmy said that he was sorry about the blip and,
although he was too young to realise the full theological implications
of an extra Muslim in Britain, he hoped that could all be sorted out asap.

Iain Duncan Smith nodded and then gestured to a large, masked henchmen.
The flogging was to be broadcast live until such a time that IDS felt
Little Jay had been flogged enough, which would not be for quite a while.
The ratings were initially high but slumped in the fifth hour when IDS
began chuckling and mumbling about how they were all listening to the quiet man now.
People did not like that at all.

Little Jay kept saying that he was sorry but there was nothing he could do.
He simply could not help it.
If he knew how to stop pulling the Earth off its axis,
if he knew how to stop pulling the Moon towards the planet
if he knew how to make the weather calm the hell down again then he surely would,
surely IDS could see that?

But he couldn’t.
The simple facts were these;
His heart was a deep, planetary weight.
So heavy it created a significant gravitational field.
So impenetrable that no light could escape it.
Some of the heaviest things in the universe were also, he discovered, the smallest.

IDS said, after consulting with the advertisers,
that there was only one solution to this conundrum.
He twisted a silencer onto his Walther PPK, slowly and surely.
Little Jay hung his head low, to make the aiming all the easier
It was no more than he deserved, it was only right and proper.
He said a little prayer and a further apology as he closed his eyes.

The ratings, by this point, had picked up again.
ITV radioed down to string it out a bit longer.
IDS, ever the showman, began reciting Latin verse, and then war poetry.
Little Jay did not cry, he would be brave even though he could barely move.
The burden of his heart nailed him in place.
He’d let her go too easy. He’d let her slip away without a fight.

Below the beat of Iain Duncan Smith’s incantations a hollow sound began.
Slight at first and then rising hard and fast to the sound of a gale.
Little Jay realised that it was the Moon, free at last from its gravitational moorings,
plummeting straight for him, seconds away, microseconds away.
Little Jay eyes were screwed tight, he would not cry.
These things were in their right and proper place.