What if tomorrow, history is erased? Scorched from Earth, a pandemic rendition of the Library of Alexandria. Documents are reduced to ashes. Computers regress into incoherent ones and zeroes. Every monument, from the Statue of Liberty to the Great Wall of China, melts into muddled lakes of clay.

Yesterday is gone. Minutes prior feel ancient. The last few seconds, a blur.

In the blink of an eye, religious quarrels disintegrate. Political parties are left speechless. A group without context bears no goals. Paper currency crinkles into dead green leaves. However, a gardener remembers to step outside and water her roses. A butcher tends to his meat. Passion remains. 

A historian wonders about their life’s purpose. A writer scrambles to record the egregious event. Perhaps some eldritch horror set our memories aflame. A quiet, divine intervention? Maybe an alien thought experiment gone wrong (or right).

Still, a father is relieved to see his daughter sound asleep in her bed. An aunt receives an urgent call from her nephew.  A mother opens her cabinets to prepare breakfast for her children. Two lovers wake up to that familiar spark from when they first met, but cautiously catch sight of their bitter neighbors. Primordial emotion evades the erasure of history, but the ultimate question sears through everyone’s minds: 

Why do they look like me, yet speak differently?

They speak the same as I do, yet look so different.

They must look different for a reason.

Why do I feel uneasy around them?

Imagine: The Black man, his skin no longer defined by slavery and lost heritage. The white man, no longer analogous to colonization or greed. Both harbor that same pathological rage. They stab one another, recognize they bleed an identical color, with that subtle scent of copper. Then they embrace and listen to their heartbeats slow. One invites the other inside to converse over a homemade meal, and after hours of failure to recall yesterday, they break into laughter, then tears. Their hate cannot be justified; an earth-shattering epiphany that deconstructs society as a whole. Once bitter neighbors, born again as friends.

Perhaps then it will be time to plant a new mycorrhizal network of historical roots. A world that shares a single trauma could begin again with compassion.

Every phenomenon stems its theories, blooms into ideas, blossoms into beliefs, and thrives as a religion. In our tomorrow, there’d be various names, but a favorite would be “Ọkụ,” synonymous with “fire,” “heat,” and “death,” in other ancient languages. Ọkụ praises the reset of history, because Ọkụ does not always equate to tragedy. Ọkụ cleanses. Ọkụ changes. Just as a wildfire burns down a forest to permit new life to flourish, Ọkụ rids us of the diseases of overgrown prejudice, bias, and institutions. It sprouts a more fruitful future. Ọkụ delivers the brave question: Did we make the old world wrong?

Ọkụ is not perfect, but it’s the best way to welcome this unknown.

We will still marvel at the tiny gems that glitter above at night. We will still create stories to make sense of existence. We will still bicker over the small details. History rhymes, but Ọkụ gives us a chance to deviate from ten-thousand years of destructive rhythmic poetry. Potential always opens the opportunity for a positive outcome, after all. 

So let the new world bow their heads over their dollar-bill fueled bonfires, hold their candle wicks with the people of the other villages, or gaze together over smokey skies and whisper,

Burn the old world to cinders. Ignite a new flame.

Born and raised as a proud Cleveland native, Isaiah Hunt focuses on near-future stories of his community, the entertainment industry, and transhumanist capitalism. When he’s not fiddling around with music, or studying Pan-African history, he’s daydreaming of worlds adjacent to our own. He has recently finished his M.F.A. in Creative Writing and is a Hopkins Fellow for John Carroll University where he currently teaches Fiction Writing. His work can be found on Luna Negra, On The Run, Black Moon Magazine, and elsewhere. You can reach him at ihunt@jcu.edu or Instagram @casual.dream.