Know how we once believed our children would surprise us. And also how we were wrong. How there was only the shock of the first prediction coming true, and after that everything else was known. Know how our oldest told us the day and date his first brother would be born, and then together they apprised us of the youngest, disclosing the hour of my wife's water breaking, the length of her labor, the exact moment of the crowning of their brother's head.
By the end of every family breakfast we already know the rest of our day: What hour it will rain. What my wife will cook for lunch and dinner. What horrible words I will say when my sons will not stop talking, and how I will try to make them stop, to make them say anything that is not a prediction, that is not the certainty-cursed future coming our way.
Before my wife can send them to their rooms, my sons have already told her that she will.
It's there that our oldest starts his book, the book he calls his diary even though every word in it is the future, some event coming later, some doom to be afraid of, to be traumatized by both before and after. The day he turns thirteen, he tells me that I will wait another three months before I sneak into his room and read this diary, and that by then it will be too late.
He says, You could save us if you read it today, but I know you won't.
Know it's a lie, another adolescent taunt, a poke at what he knows has already happened, because I have read his diary, including the earlier entry predicting I would, and yes, because of this I do know what will happen in three months: At the end of the summer, our house will burn, and all my boys will burn too, caught in their shared bedroom because their mother cannot stand anymore to always be told what will happen next, cannot bear her entire life being scripted by her oldest son, appended and corrected in the margins by his younger brothers.
Know I could stop her. Know my sons knowing I could.
Know how when the day comes they bang their fists against the locked and nailed door, the thick-boarded windows. Know how they curse and accuse and scream for mercy when the house begins to collapse, and then again even after it crumbles, while still they struggle beneath its weight of wood and stone as my wife and I hold hands in the street, at the end of our yard, the outer edge of this widening circle of heat-blackened, smoke-wilted grass.
What joy on her face then, despite the last screams of our sons: To again have a world unknown, beset with unexpected joys, unplanned for tribulations! To again live our lives with both doubt and hope!
Know how she says, Will you ever forgive me?
And how I say, Not yet. But soon.
And then my wife staring at my face, wondering but not knowing: Whether I have stolen the diary she believed still hidden in the boy's room, secreted under their bunks.
And also not knowing: That our eldest told me I would take it. That I wouldn't be able to give up possessing the future just because he was gone.
And also: That there are only a few pages past today's date, and on each page only a single day.
Know there is not much else to know.
Know there is a finite amount of everything remaining.
Know this future is almost over, and know we will live to see it end.
And afterward: Whatever cataclysm follows, at last a surprise.