Excerpt From "If Not the Moon, Then the Exquisite Sun", by Carl Roloff

Today's excerpt.  My name for it is poetic sci-fi.  It has real beauty, as well as the end of the world.

All the flowers open at once, and suddenly we're surrounded by the scents of a thousand blossoms that won't live out sunrise. We had called them the Dawn Callers, by their strange quirk of opening about an hour before the sun began to swell. Shimmering dark purple, the kind only a full moon can really bring out.

“You need to make up your mind soon,” she says, her head pillowed on my stomach and me spread-eagle on the ground like one awaiting crucifixion. “We could still go together, save ourselves.”

It was the end of all things. Our sun was to betray us, but we had found an escape of sorts. We had discovered that everyone's dreams, everyone's hopes, hates and loves could be distilled, reduced down by some arcane process into a lattice of purest crystal. We would abstract ourselves into gauzy glimmering structures, lazy cobwebs of colour that refract the light into mad patterns and sudden pits of darkness. A human, translated into a chip of eternity. Then, the flight from our doomed planet: convoys of carnelian, emerald and garnet sailing out into the deepest reaches of space. We would go with the hope that being an unthinking piece of beauty was better than being a cinder.