If you had been lucky enough to be a journalist covering this non-event, you could legitimately claim to have been a witness to history. You could regale your grandchildren with stories of the time you had seen nothing happen on a truly mammoth scale. Christine Temetri, however, had the ill fortune to be born over a hundred years too late to cover the Great Disappointment, and as a result had been cursed to cover a series of Mild Disappointments that didn’t even really warrant the capital letters. There’s something to be said for covering spectacular failures; that was, in fact, what most journalists did most of the time. Covering an endless series of Mild Disappointments, on the other hand, was just demoralizing.

It wasn’t that Christine disbelieved in the Apocalypse. She had always sort of believed in it as a concept; the idea that the human race would eventually have to account for its many sins – war, hatred, Michael Bay films…. But she couldn’t remember a time when she had thought of it as an actual historical event.

At some point she must have thought of it as a definite, temporal occurrence, thanks to her Lutheran parents, just as at some point she had believed that Adam and Eve were real live people. But as she had gotten older, the extreme ends of the Bible had begun to fray in her mind. She did her best to hold onto the middle, but Genesis and Revelation were too remote from her own experience to connect to anything concrete. In college she had once read about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and despite the fact that she tended to think of physics as occupying a realm of eclectic trivia that was fundamentally divorced from daily reality – like the rules of tennis or the intricacies of the Electoral College – the idea of certain truths being inherently unknowable resonated with her. These days she tended to think of herself as a Heisenbergian Christian: she believed in the broad outlines of Christianity, but she was unable to pinpoint the specifics of her creed. She was okay with the wave; it was the particles that tended to escape her.

As she drove east across the barren landscape toward Salt Lake City, the latest Mild Disappointment continued to assault her in the form of the blazing sun burning globs of red hot lava in her field of vision, and it was difficult not to take the harassment personally. “What are you mad at me for?” Christine grumbled at the unreasoning sun, “I’m on your side.” But the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike, and Christine’s unwavering faith that the fiery orb would rise that morning was no protection against its blinding rays.