They had it coming

“They had it coming.”

It’s a taut line of string that rewinds, snap, so quickly that I question the convention of time.

They had it coming,

a memory like my body telling my brain that there are some things I simply should not eat.

My body gives it to my brain and my brain says, “Give that some thought,”

They had it coming. 

Everywhere I look, “They had it coming,” 

And now, at the end of this human unlikeliness on a planet too beautiful for us, that sentence appears on some marker somewhere that some entity will find a million years from now:

“They had it coming.” 

Sid Shroyer is the author of When Once Destroyed, A Historical Memoir of the Life and Death of a Small Town