The Rapture Machine
2025-Aug-26 • Joshua Walker
They buried God in a vending machine behind the old roller rink, and we paid in teeth to hear Him hum. The first time I knelt there I was twelve, full of diet cola and visions. My father’s voice had gone to static. My mother’s eyes were made of moonlight and knives. The man at the pawn shop said the gun was jammed, so I came here instead- to feed my molars to the future.
When you press A7, it spits out the dream you almost died in. B2 is your last kiss, slowed down to the speed of light. C4 is what your voice sounds like to someone who never loved you back. I kept pressing. I kept pressing. The buttons were cold as divinity. I was trying to find the one that made it stop- the grief, the years, the static crawling up my neck at night whispering it’s all your fault, even the wind.
Behind the machine there’s a door only drunks and children can see. Through it: a hallway of all your discarded names. Mine were glowing like cancer. Mine were etched on every door.
Somewhere between sin and signal I met a woman made of timestamps. She told me, You were never real, but you were beautiful. Then she peeled open her ribs and showed me my life on a reel of film that looped and looped and looped until it caught fire and I was born again, screaming in binary.
I am not saved. I am not even salvageable. But I’ve seen the machine, and I know its gospel: every button is a story, and every story is a lie that once made someone live.
There’s a boy asleep in the wires now. He hums the same tune the machine did- just a little off-key, just a little broken. He doesn’t know I’m watching. He doesn’t know I left something behind: not a soul, not a prayer, just a sliver of myself sharp enough to bleed the future. If anyone finds it, tell them I loved them too late.
Joshua Walker
Joshua Adam Walker is a freelance poet and speculative writer known to his readers as The Last Bard. With over 310,000 followers across platforms, his work blends myth, memory, and raw human truth. He is the lead poet in the June issue of Libre, the sole poet in Solarpunk Magazine’s May/June issue, and a Bridport Prize bursary recipient. His poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Potomac Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Nat 1, and over twenty other journals. He writes from Oklahoma City and from the edge of memory.