prompt: serve / title: working titles in misc. flash fiction

That common phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” is literally-true as far as the literal truth goes, but the beginning is only one part of a story, and the other half of that truism is that Rome didn’t fall in a day, either. It took centuries to rise and took perhaps even longer to undeniably collapse.

It’s not like one day there was a decree of defunctitude released by some out-going emperor and they put out all the torches and rolled up all of the aqueducts that evening. There was a systemic denial. Understandably! Every generation thinks it’s The End Of The World, of course, as Wilco sang, but every generation thinks it’s going to be a big, glorious Ragnarök or Rapture, Biblically Accurate Angels, Surtur unleashed, boom-shakka-doom, their tribe wins and everyone else dies.

Worlds do not end like this, however. It’s hard to even hold the perspective to understand it, as a human born en media res, in the middle of a billion different stories already in progress and will die with ten billion different stories continuing on. It is a deficiency inherent in our species, I am afraid. Our sense of beginning, middle and ending is confounded by our pathetic senses of scale.

Over the decades it took for Rome to fall, everyone was too busy living their day-to-day lives to fully grasp the slow inexorable changes around them. And how could they? They still had to eat and sleep and do their jobs and make love and drink and dream and buy clothes and all the other things that, in granular totality, make up a human being’s life. A rumor of a mutiny in their outer colonies, perhaps. The Post, no longer coming from Gaul. The plumbing, failing more regularly. Any one of these things could serve as nothing more than an isolated hiccup in the functions of civil authority. Where’s the time to see patterns when, either way, there’s bread to bake tonight?

Oh, we have our localized occurrences of Apocalypse, of course. Pompeii sure snuck up on folk. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were split-seconds of Humanity’s depthless capacity for sin that only a handful of experimental-physicists could’ve even imagined, before those horrible moments. But terrible disasters as they were, those were Cities, not Empires. The surrounding social structures eventually recovered and moved on. Not in a single day, either, but they did eventually rebound.

There were centuries of pretenders to the throne afterwards, claiming they were the rump state of the true Pax Romana, that the return of their imperial glory was just one more tax-hike, one more pitched war in their hinter-lands away from another Gilded Age. They were liars or fools or, as so often with military or political leaders, usually both? The truths were written on the decomposing temple walls around them. They were simply too busy trying to live individual lives to really see.

The hopefulness of each new morning’s promise blinds you to the culmination of rot, I’m afraid.