prompt: desultory, title: don't get carried away in misc. flash fiction

We’d expected the Rapture to be fun, of course. We figured it would leave humanity without the sanctimonious stick-in-the-mud hypocrites and full-stop psychotics that’d ranted about it for the last seventeen hundred years or so. That was all just common logic.

We turned out both wrong and right at the same time, however. The real deep-down belly laughs of the Rapture, you see, were instead in how few people had disappeared at all. Oh, the looks on some of those puckered-up faces. God may as well have farted straight into their ice creams.

Around two-hundred-thousand all disappeared same day, same hour, clothing left in the streets and everything, such a small percentage considering seven billion in the pool, it took a while to put the pattern together. It was around the same count as assorted splinters of Islam Christianity and Judaism had been depending on from ancient numerologies, you think they would’ve been happy for that at least, but no. Of course not, as the folks who’d calculated those numbers from dusty scrolls and sold pamphlets on street corners and in crystal cathedrals, every one of those profit-margin marginal-prophets still had feet squarely on Terra Firma.

And how they hated that.

The conmen who’d built empires on promises that only people exactly like you are special, they retreated into the expected spin-control, that this was Scratch’s trickery or the work of commies, whatever the bugbear of their milieu. Some even went into hiding to pretend they too had been assumed, but no escape plan or conspiracy theory could ever undo their obvious unworthiness.

The true-believers who couldn’t cash golden tickets to That Candy Factory in The Sky, though, their fate was less hilarious. The realization of all their holier-than-thou had paid out nothing, it shorted their minds. They quit their jobs, left their churches and homes to wander empty days in desultory patterns, as if elephants gone mad in zoo captivity, left to sway their heads back and forth at nothing until death. Arguably better fate than spending life wrapped in exceptionalism, privilege and hate but it was just so pathetic to witness, you’ve no idea.

So, we’re going to send the quality people back, after all. We’re taking a mulligan on the whole End of The World thing for now. It was just so sad to see you all without the reinforcement of your prejudices, we’re going to give the whole schmear one more shot. Those few good among you will return, they begged for it anyway, wanted to save your probably-hopeless asses out of the kindness of their damned fool hearts.

They’re coming back, empowered and refreshed, to try and help you apes grow out of throwing rocks at each other over patches of dirt but be warned, this is your last chance. If they can’t do it, we’re blowing the whole thing up, no exception, no Rapture, no more Arks. At least for us, from the perspectives of angels, we’re pretty sure it’ll be funny either way.