This Is How The World Ends

In the beginning, there was a heartbeat. In the end, there will be none. Maybe that is why I still wear the locket—even after everything that has happened.

It is such an impractical object to keep on the run. At the beginning of the ending, when the value of precious metals was soaring like mad, I could have traded it. For something. Maybe for everything. I don’t know.

When people thought there might still be a future to hold things precious in, they would have ripped the heart-shaped locket my great grandmother gave me for my 13th birthday clean off my neck.

They robbed me of so much else. Why not the locket? Why not my heart?

Perhaps it was so small that no one noticed.

We moved through the suburban byways that led out of the city, so many human bodies slouching toward Bethlehem, moving like a river of flesh. Water—that’s what we were searching for by then—and the bodies in the moving river of flesh looked only at their feet as we drifted outward from the dried-up urban core. Water. You could taste the word in your mouth like blood after you bite your tongue. We wanted it more than anything. No one was searching for precious metals then—there was no strength left to crawl.

Margot and I got separated somewhere where the asphalt met farmland outside of town. Many people collapsed in the cornfields—or what used to be cornfields, before the crops died of thirst.

The crops died first. Then the people. That is usually the way of things. I remembered learning that in school once. At the middle of the ending of things.

When we got separated, it happened slowly then all at once. That is also usually the way of things. I noticed that her hand had slipped out of mine—I don’t know when—only that when I looked up, she was gone. Many who had fled the city had drifted off. Some in small groups, off through the fields, others alone.

A seed inside me of the world before wanted to cry out—to scream her name—but my throat was so dry I knew it would come out only as a whisper.

This is how the world ends, this is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper—I remembered that from a poem in Freshman Lit class. T.S. Elliot. Not with my brain—I didn’t have the strength for that kind of remembering—but in my bones, where we keep the deep knowledge of all the things that made us “us” in the time before.

When I got to the river, I quite literally stumbled upon it. I fell and clawed my way through the damp earth on the banks, ripping up clumps of soil like a zombie rising from the grave. That last two feet felt like a mile. Like a lifetime.

When I finally reached the water, I stuck my jaw into it and laid there, just absorbing it. I didn’t even have the strength to lap it up like a dog. I just let it flood into my mouth like a fish.

We lived in oceans once—that’s why some people still have webbed feet. This whole state was a sea once, you can see traces of it in the limestone fossils down at the city park—you told me that once. In the before times. At the beginning of the ending. Which may be a beginning yet. For something. Somewhere.

I whispered your name. It came out only as a gargle. Maybe that’s how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a gargle.

I let the water wash over me. I begged the current: make me whole.