by Roberta Umor, Yuma Sun

8 September 2020: Yuma, AZ — A lone figure followed his shadow down the length of the yellow stripe in the center of Main Street. No cars honked. No police hassled him. No one even noticed.

He carried a sign in one hand, a Bible in the other. In crude lettering, the sign read:

the end is ‘Night

Everyone knew exactly what it meant.

“He’s telling us the end of the world is coming,” said an old man found loitering in City Park. “And man-oh-man, is he ever right!”

“Nighttime, dude, that’s what he’s saying,” claimed a young man practicing leaping on his surf board from the bumper of his ’57 Chevy. (The fact that both he and his Chevy were standing in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, 200 miles from the Pacific Ocean, didn’t seem to daunt the young man.) “Nighttime is like the way the day ends, dude. Every day there’s this thing, this dark thing, nighttime, and then the sun like rises and surf’s up!” He leaped gracefully from the Chevy to the surfboard and rode a wave of sand into a sea of his own imagining.

“The man is a vagrant,” reported Officer Beatrice. “He makes this journey every night, right down the middle of the street, and we can’t touch him because the friggin’ First Amendment protects his right to say any damn nonsense he wants to.” The Officer waited at the corner of Fourth and Main while the lone figure with the sign proceeded down Main Street toward her. “Of course,” the Officer added with a hint of a smile, “as soon as he puts the sign down, I will bust his butt for vagrancy. That’s the law.”

The Officer chewed her gum slowly as she waited on Main Street.

“He’s just a poor, depressed Dozer fan,” Lauraine Palm told this reporter after she finished her phone call. “Leave him be. I told you, I told you all. Winning is hard. Winning will hurt. Winning is gonna cost. But no one listened.”

Lauraine spent the afternoon making phone calls to potential employers. Since the closure of Anna’s Mexican Food, she’s been out of work.

“Lots of folks are gonna be hurting soon,” she added. “That damn ball club got their hopes up so high, this town was flying! And now they’ve come back down to reality. Didn’t the Bears just tie them for first? Yeah, today! What happens tomorrow when they lose and they are no longer in first place? For the first time this year? I don’t think I want to be here. The place is gonna explode.”

Lauraine returned to her job hunt.

Meanwhile, across town, former restauranteur Anna was more philosophical about the Dozers’ season.

“So they lose?” she said. “Big deal. Every one lose. Losing natural. You get over it. But we had fun, yes? Was best summer in history of Yuma, yes?”

When asked how she could remain so optimistic after losing her restaurant, Anna replied, “Not so easy come, not so easy go. I be back.”

Back in the middle of Main Street, the solitary sign bearer walked right up to Officer Beatrice and handed her his sign. The Officer dutifully cuffed him and took him to the station for booking.

In the middle of the desert, in the middle of an empty street, in the middle of the night—the longest night of the season for Dozer fans—a simple sign lay on the pavement, its message clear for all to read.