The slab of rock that he was attempting to prise from the wall suddenly gave way and fell with a thick clack to the ground at his feet.

He crouched down and turned it over to examine it closer.

It was roughly the size and shape of his two hands laid flat side by side. A wide vein of… something threaded through the surface, marking a stark contrast with the surrounding stone. The slab of rock itself looked substantial but turned out to be even more so when he set about trying to lift it. It was with an embarrassing heave and grunt that he transferred it from the damp cave floor to take its place among its siblings in the cart.

He removed his glove and traced his thumb along the mineral vein that was webbing its way across the exterior. It was smooth and slick and curiously warm to the touch.

He wasn’t quite sure what it was that he was doing here. The thought crept on delicate insectile legs from his subconscious to the forefront of his mind. The project, of course, was important, but his place as a part of it puzzled him. When he thought of the men and women who were his colleagues on this project, he saw people who had risen through the ranks of their profession with a gleaming reputation of excellence and hard work. By comparison, hadn’t he just kind of drifted into his position through some combination of luck, happy accidents, and potentially simple mismanagement? He had participated in a number of successful projects in the past, and had admittedly made some minor contributions, but hadn’t he spent most of his time riding the coattails of greater minds and more talented individuals? The persistent dread of being found out for the imposter that he was had permeated most of his waking hours and not a few of his sleeping ones.

A sinking sensation spread its way down his body and left him with a sour feeling in his gut and a veil of cool sweat spread across his skin. He wrenched his attention away from his most recent find, replaced his glove, and moved back to the area that he had been studying prior to his encounter with the stone.

Just above the area that had been vacated by this previous sample was a long tight crack, looking almost like someone had noticed the break and attempted to glue it back together. He reached down to the belt at his waist and removed a chisel. He fit the inclined plane of the tip into a section of the crack that was just a bit wider than the rest, securing it there with a few gentle taps with the blunt end of the pick hammer. Now that the chisel was a stable target and wouldn’t be moving around on him, he drew the hammer back to give it a proper whack.

In the very next motion, he found himself dropping the pick hammer and reaching reflexively for his face. A chip of stone had detached from the edge of the crack and flown into the corner of his eye. He coddled the area with his cupped hands, feeling a warm liquid running down his cheek. He was reasonably certain that what he was feeling were tears but still found himself shy away from checking his hands.

He let out a chuckle, a small laugh that was full of emotion but entirely bereft of humor. Wasn’t this exactly the sort of thing that would happen to him? He had gotten distracted for just a moment and forgotten to replace his eye protection, and the world had chosen that moment to stab him in the eye. It is to be expected, though, isn’t it? Isn’t this just the type of thing that happens nowadays? A bygone age was the day of the “happy accident,” never to be seen again.] Now every accident, hell even the most well-intentioned purposeful acts, can’t help but result in tragedy. Every time there seems to be some glimmer of hope on the horizon, a blanket of doom swoops in to smother it.

He set his eyes, one healthy and one red and weeping, on the rest of the team, every last one of them self-serving, bigoted fools. They think he doesn’t know, but of course, he does. There isn’t a one of them that wouldn’t scapegoat their own firstborn if it would give them a momentary warm feeling of superiority.

The world is full of these people. You can see the disdain burning behind their eyes, the seeds of genocide sprouting in their hearts. When you ask yourself the why and how of all of the worst moments in history, all you have to do is look around you and the answers are everywhere.

The only hope is escape.

Fly away from this doomed world and find rest. Peace.

A tear trickles down the edge of his nose, and with it, the splinter runs from his eye.

He wipes the moisture from the corner of his eye, a feeling of relief washing over him as the stinging pain of the shard dissipates by the second.

He picks up his goggles and makes sure that they are perched securely in place. His focus returns to the chisel jutting out from the crack in the wall. He brings down the hammer again with an echoing clang, then again, the sounds overlapping each other as they bounce off the walls of the enclosed area. With a crack, a sheet separates itself from the wall and falls to the ground.

Under the grey surface, is a rough material sparkling gold. As he looks closer, he can see that the deposit has worked its way to the surface in several places, dotting the exterior. A smirk curls the corner of his mouth as half-formed puns begin to swirl in his head along with the overwhelming urge to make people groan rather than laugh. Some jokes make you chuckle, some make you laugh uncontrollably, then there are jokes that make your best friends and family declare their undying hatred for you. In other words, puns.

His smile broadens, he laughs to himself, the real audience for any of the humor flowing through his mind. A pun is not told but inflicted.

He turns away from this new artifact, leaving it with the others and the storm that had been his mind has receded. The laugh dies in his throat and his expression straightens on his face.

Examining the place where this most recent specimen was removed, he finds a small hole. He strikes it with the pick end of his hammer and it crumbles along the edge, revealing not only a hole but a large hollow in the rock. A few more blows from the pick remove the thin, more brittle edges and he is able to insert his arm into the hollow. At first glance there is nothing inside, it is dry and free of any residue or dust. As he continues to probe the hollow, he hears a light scraping noise along the bottom of the curve.

He can’t quite pick it up with the clumsy work gloves, so he removes them again and the slight moisture of his ungloved hand is enough to extract the minute speck of material hidden inside. Immediately upon touching it, a warmness overtakes his body. He feels safe, like nothing in the world can touch him. An overwhelming sensation of well-being overtakes him and he knows that even if he is vulnerable to the world, it’s ok.

The world doesn’t mean him harm.

There are loving, caring people in the world that wish nothing but the best for him, and for everyone around them. The forces who mean to kill and destroy in this world will ultimately fail and we will find peace and universal prosperity.

It is not only possible but inevitable.

Just like that, the tiny speck on his finger dissolves and is nothing.

He returns to the hollow, but that was it, it is now truly void. All that had been at home there, long worn away and diminished by the passage of time and life, was now gone.

The vanished speck has left him as a reflection of the space in the rock, he feels hollow, has been hollowed out. Even the brief presence of that substance has left the world darker, more sinister through its lack. He might have been able to subsist if he had never encountered it, but feeling its lack has left the walls of the world echoing with whispered pleas for death. A world without that mote of dust was an existence without air to breathe or water to drink. It was fundamental to life and without it, we cannot help but perish. He would do anything to fill up that hole that has been opened up inside of him. He is now thrown open and vulnerable to whoever or whatever would promise to make this feeling go away.

He thinks of the rocks.

There has to be something there to fix him, something to fill the void.

He roots through the samples that he has yet to examine, grasping a muddy red chunk of rock in his fingers. He feels its weight and jagged edges against his skin. As much as he knows that he shouldn’t, he allows the energy pulsing through him to carry him away. It is a loud thumping in his ears, drowning out the sorrow that had taken up residence in his chest, but allowing a kinetic fury to rise to the surface in its place.

With a single jerky motion, he overturns the cart holding the rest of the samples, sending it crashing and the stones clattering to the ground. He takes the pick hammer to the metal table that he was working on, digging deep gauges in the stainless steel, finally giving way to ragged puncture wounds.

A wildness overtakes his face, his eyes widening and nostrils flaring, a manic smile creeping into the corners of his mouth. He goes to work on the wall again, the pick end of the hammer connecting with the wall in careless unmeasured blows.

The energy that had been surging through him so haphazardly just a moment before has exhausted itself and him along with it. He hunches over, out of breath with his hands on his knees, head swimming… and he is empty again.

He allows himself to slump to the floor, still panting from the brief outburst of emotion. Once he has managed to pull himself back under control again, he sifts through the chips and chunks of rock that his tantrum had left for him. There was a pebble, blue and almost perfectly round… too perfect to be natural, but there it was freed from the stone wall.

His mind started to drift toward the people that he had known over the years, and people whose stories he had heard or read. People, some of whom were like him, but mostly they weren’t. People who had been taken advantage of, those who had been transformed into victims or pushed to the margins. People who had to deal so often with not being treated as people at all, but like threats or playthings or a means to an end.

This didn’t feel like the rage that had just surged through him, but it wasn’t completely unlike it, there was also something like the cynicism he had felt earlier, but also different, perhaps because it was formed less from self-pity and more from a sense of compassion. It felt an awful lot like the absence that the speck left behind, but it wasn’t hollow, it was dense and full even if he wasn’t sure that he wanted what it was filled with.

He moved to lay the pebble back where he had found it but was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that was the one thing he must not do. This stone was precious and just the thought that he would let it out of his sight or even away from his person was unthinkable, an affront to its very existence. It would be crass to put it on display like jewelry, but all the same, it was imperative that he hold on to it and carry it with him from this day forward.

He pushed himself back up to his feet and brushed himself off. He slipped the stone into his pants pocket and patted the spot where it made contact with his hip, assuring himself that it was safe.

A glimmer of intuition came to light in his mind, and he thought just maybe, that stone riding around at his side was the key to rebuilding the thing that had left the hollow in the rock. It wouldn’t happen right away, but if he kept that stone with him, he might look inside himself one day and find that it was no longer a hollow at all, but a force that could help to move the world.

(0 seconds)

Cucumbers are a wonderfully straightforward piece of food prep. I might get a strange piece of satisfaction out of striping them with the peeler before cutting them into chubby little oversized coins, but the mechanic is just simple repetitive slicing. It’s not like trying to prep broccoli where you are constantly weighing whether you are either cutting too little, leaving a huge jaw-cracking portion for someone to cram into their mouth, or cutting too much, being left with a pile of sad little broccoli crumbs.

Yes, cucumbers are easy, and I’m nearly done with this gargantuan vegetable tray that we’re planning on laying out for today’s party. Just a couple more cucumbers.

They should be back soon with balloons and…

(47 seconds)

That strange sensation when you know that you’ve cut yourself, but it’s more intellectual than physical because your brain seems to shy away from experiencing pain under circumstances like this. Better expressed through a simple shout of “Dammit!”

I find myself cradling the injured thumb, not exactly excited to pull away my hand to see what kind of damage I have managed to inflict upon myself. It could have been worse. The flap of skin that had once been the tip of my thumb was still clinging to the position that it had once held so naturally by a healthy portion of remaining flesh. The observation quick, owing to the ooze of blood that immediately began to roll down my hand as soon as I removed the pressure applied by its uninjured brother.

I reapply the pressure and make my way down the hall to the bathroom. The first aid kit has taken a vacation from its normal wanderings, as I swing open the closet door and find it in plain sight rather than nesting among towels or cowering behind a colony of dietary supplements. Its newfound generous nature does not extend to cooperation with the complicated bit of three-fingered unzipping that is involved in continuing to apply pressure while rooting out an appropriate bandage for this self-inflicted…

(94 seconds)

Wound.

”What. the. hell?” I drop the knife, reflexively shedding the tool that had so recently caused me harm.

I’m back in the kitchen, and there is no blood. My hand is whole, and what in the world just happened? I check myself, patting myself down to make sure I really am all in one piece, stemming not from any physical sensation, but from a complete lack of anything else to do.

The change in setting is a jolt to the system, the kitchen taking on an air of alienness simply by not being the room that I was standing in just moments before. It is otherwise just as I would expect it to be, zip-lock bags of carrots, broccoli, and peppers pushed to the side of the counter awaiting the cucumbers that would soon be joining them.

My gaze shifts to the place where I dropped the knife alongside the cutting board which was currently playing host to the first of three… but hadn’t I just been finishing up the second when I cut myself?

It was hard to be sure, but I could have…

(141 seconds)

Sworn.

There it was again. The knife was back in my hand.

When we talk about all of the things that we take for granted, our thoughts tend to drift toward things like a roof over our heads, food on the table, or health. What we almost never seem to consider is how much we take for granted the relative order of our physical world. Part of me wants to grab onto the counter for fear of floating away even though gravity isn’t the basic building block of my existence that has decided to stop working.

I drop the knife again, slowly backing away from the counter then turning to tear out of the house. I burst through the door gulping fresh air on my front step. When I raise my head to look around, I’m not alone, I see neighbors up and down the street coming out of their homes looking at the world around them like they had never seen it before.

The birds are acting every bit as odd like they were lost in the sky. The feeling of displacement seemed to permeate everything around me. I would be willing to believe that the grass was feeling disoriented by this sudden shift in the status quo.

I raise my hand in preparation to flag down my next-door neighbor when I …

(188 seconds)

Find myself back in my kitchen.

Whirling away from the counter, I make a mad dash for the front door. I am through and flying along the front walk, taking the moderate shortcut of hopping the retaining wall toward my goal of the neighbor’s front door. When I materialize on his front step, it’s as if none of the intervening steps had even happened. My fist rains blows on his front door, the kind of knocking that we partition off in our minds to the worlds of horror stories, and normally wouldn’t dare indulge in polite society.

Maybe polite society had gone out the window along with whatever else this is. I’m fairly certain that polite society spends most of its time propped up on the sill just waiting to head out the window.

In contrast to the sprint over here, the wait at the door seems nearly interminable, but finally, the storm door still rattling in its frame, my neighbor opened the inner door. There was a dazed look on his face, like wherever he had gone, he wasn’t currently residing behind his own eyes.

“What… what’s going on.” The words tumbled from his lips, an act of gravity rather than a force of will.

“I don’t know,” the words escaped in a manic rush. “Look at this. I cut my hand just a minute ago, and look.”

I waved my unharmed hand in front of his still vacant eyes, a hysterical motion that was driving him deeper into his shell if it was evoking any reaction at all.

My head snapped to the side as eruptions of activity burst up and down the block, neighbors shouting themselves hoarse from their front yards, crying out for someone, anyone to fix this thing that had broken.

(235 seconds)

And suddenly silence. The silence was jarring, like a power outage where life is going along at full speed until suddenly everything stops. The knife is in my hand, but the abrupt change in stimuli has knocked me off-kilter. I find myself swaying on the spot for just a moment until my brain decides that it has rebooted.

I lay the knife down again, certain that I am in no state at the moment to be wielding a sharp object, no matter how quickly an unfortunate accident might be corrected.

This is a time loop, I try to decide whether a life filled with utopian science fiction and Bill Murray movies has made what is happening more or less believable. I come to the conclusion that it is probably a wash, then decide to move on to something more pressing like… I actually don’t know. This is so far outside of my reference for the possible that normal categories like “why” and “what now” seem out of reach. I haven’t been given a prologue painting me as a despicable person in need of redemption, or a basket full of technobabble that will allow me to pull a god out of a box.

(282 seconds)

And here I am with that damn knife back in my hand again. The effect of being reset was significantly diminished this time around, hardly any shock to the system at all, just the press of the knife in my hand without reaching to pick it up. If I am going to think, being stationary is probably the best bet. My consciousness seems to be continuous within the loop, it’s just the physical that slams back into place every time we reset.

It is we. It definitely isn’t just me. The whole neighborhood as far as I could see was bubbling with chaos the last time I was out there.

It hits me like a ton of bricks and suddenly I’m the biggest asshole on the face of the Earth.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been caught in this loop, but it is far too long to have failed to spare a single thought for my family, and how this has to be affecting them as well. I’m a grown man by himself in his own home and I’ve been freaking out. I can’t imagine what my kids must be thinking, this has to be terrifying for them, and my wife doesn’t have the luxury of simply taking care of herself.

I reach for my phone in the corner and quickly tap my way to my wife’s spot on my contact list. It’s late in the cycle, so we may not get a chance to talk, but I can’t not try to get through.

It immediately connects.

“You have reached the voicemail of…

(329 seconds)

My attention is yanked from the voicemail recording and the cell phone is replaced once again by the knife in my hand. I feel a brief bubbling of rage beginning to stir in my chest, but I don’t have time to entertain it. I take a deep breath and press it down, latching onto a temporary false calm that is going to push me through these next few moments.

My hand darts once again for my phone in the corner, wishing for just a moment that the paranoid weirdo who turned off the voice controls on my phone would have seen fit to hand me back these couple seconds. My shaky hands manage to botch the thumb scanner on the first try, but also manage not to dash the phone against a wall after doing so… and I’m in. A pair of swipes and three taps has the phone reaching out again… ringing this time.

“Come on, pick up, pick up.” I find myself chanting it to myself as it rings once, twice, three times, and voicemail again.

That’s too soon. I may avoid phone calls like the plague, but I know her phone doesn’t go to voicemail that quickly. I hang up and redial.

Voicemail.

Again.

Nothing.

“You have reached the voicemail of…”

(376 seconds)

The reset.

I lay down the knife and set to pacing.

The motion isn’t manic, at least I hope it isn’t, just contemplative.

Under what circumstances would a phone go straight to voicemail?

The phone was destroyed in a terrible accident and my whole family is dead.

This whole thing is really stressful and she just turned the phone off.

My call distracted her at a crucial moment causing her to get into a horrific accident.

I’ve killed my family… but if that’s true it only happened that last time.

Bad cell phone coverage.

Dead battery.

What kind of effect does a time loop even have on technology like a cell phone?

This is wishful thinking. I have no reason to think that they are okay, and while I have no concrete evidence that something has happened to them, I have every reason to believe that they are in danger. I’ve been thrown off balance just bouncing back to my kitchen, if they are in the car driving, there is every chance that the roads have turned into an absolute meat grinder.

My imagination starts feeding me worst-case scenarios and is refusing to provide me with anything that might resemble a thought that could debunk any of them. I have no way of knowing, and I was right before when it occurred to me that trying to make contact might only make things worse.

I slump to the counter, head in my hands…

(423 seconds)

But immediately, I find myself upright again, standing stupidly over a cutting board playing host to a half-dismembered cucumber.

I’m not exactly sure what takes me over, maybe just a craving for normalcy, maybe I’m simply running from all of the possible implications of what may have just happened, but I start cutting the cucumbers again. Quickly polishing off the first, then removing the ends of the second, I found myself rushing through it, threatening to cut myself again.

I push aside the finished, though somewhat mangled remains of the second cucumber and move to the third. With quick jerky motions, I slice the ends off of this last cucumber, when…

(470 seconds)

Time resets again and the same job lies before me.

I rush right back into it again, convincing myself that these cucumbers are the hurdle I must clear to set the world right again.

I feel like the pixelated avatar in an old video game who, having worked through all of the logical ways to work through a puzzle, has resorted to stupid things that can’t possibly be the solution. In those worlds, sometimes the stupid thing works after all, and aren’t I little more than an infinitely respawning avatar at this point?

The cut, but not particularly presentable, cucumbers sit in front of me and I stare at them with a misguided satisfaction that would rival that of a toddler who has just completed a crayon masterpiece all over the living room wall.

(517 seconds)

A moment of disorientation, then rage.

My arm pulls back and flings the knife across the kitchen and through the dining room where it deflects off the window and clatters to the floor.

Okay, I lost it there for a second.

The adrenaline dumped into my system after that outburst has my whole body shaking on the spot. I find myself pacing the kitchen just to burn off some of the nervous energy. The anxiety that had at least temporarily hidden itself under the veneer of the calm and reason that I preferred to bring to the situation had ridden the anger to take control of the situation, and like the idiot son of the owner who has now become your boss, it had no business being in charge of anything.

I was in no condition to figure how long I had been trapped in this loop, but some optimistic part of my spirit seemed to think that I had done well to make it this far before I cracked.

(564 seconds)

And just like that, nearly all of my panic dissipated. I had the knife in my hand again, but the impulse to chuck it at things had passed. The cycle had reset and with it, the internal chemistry of my body had returned to its baseline. I’m not ready to call it a happy side-effect of the time loop, but it is kind of nice that I’m not even now struggling to bring myself down from a runaway rage.

It has been a little while since I have stuck my head outside, at least in a relative sense when time literally has ceased to have any meaning. The urgency has leaked out of my movements as I drift through the house to the front door. Where I was rushing with abandon just minutes ago… it seems impossible that only minutes have passed, I am seeking now to merely get a taste of what is going on outside of my own walls.

Standing on my front step, it could hardly be any more different from how it was the last time I had ventured outdoors. Where chaos threatened to tear the neighborhood apart then, the current scene was the picture of serenity. The quiet calm of what met me at the door was every bit as unsettling as the panic in the air before.

I stood there allowing the barrenness of the landscape to envelope me, the realization of what it all meant sinking in…

(611 seconds)

As the knife reappeared in my hand, and I was once again encased in the walls of my kitchen.

I was going to have to see what happened, and something told me that once that decision was made, it was going to keep being made… over and over again.

But not right now. That was not a bandaid that I was going to be able to immediately pull off. I would do it next time. Next time I would have my head together enough to do it.

I backpedaled and sagged into the opposite corner of the kitchen next to the stove, just a few seconds to pull myself together, and then I would do it.

It wasn’t really necessary, was it? If I knew, had worked it out in my head, I didn’t have to actually experience it, right?

There are certainly much worse situations to deceive yourself about. What would I gain, really? I would have the lay of the land, but how much could that matter? I have no capability of existing in that land, how could the lay of it matter?

This was silly. I would do it.

(658 seconds)

And just like that, the time had come.

I calmly set the knife back down on the counter and moved with a measured determined pace back through the living room to the front door. The confrontation of the doorway led to the slightest of hesitations, but I pushed through and retook my place on the front step.

The first thing I saw was the birds. If I am being honest with myself, I knew it would be. A sick part of me has to stifle a laugh as the lyrics to an old Cake song decide to surface in my head. The birds were falling from the sky like stones or small loaves of bread, but not one of them made the decision to halt their descent with a last-minute flutter of their wings.

I’m pulled out of my inappropriate indulgence in popular cultural irony when I hear the first pop on the horizon. That first one is far off, but it’s not unexpected, and if I continue to be right, it is about to be joined by others.

The far-off ones remain pops, but they are accompanied by closer bangs and, my stomach falls, a crash three doors down. The quiet returns and all that I can do is allow it to press in on me until I feel like I am almost suffocated by it. I can’t help but to give in to it and allow it to do with me what it will for the eternity of seconds that remain until I return to the beginning again.

(705 seconds)

It doesn’t let go. Tears begin to stream down my face and I collapse onto the cool tile floor.

My body has decided to fight back against that silence with loud out of controlling sobbing, and there is no pulling myself back together. My hot tears fight a separate war against the cold ceramic against my cheek and there is not enough of my conscious mind present to care who wins.

(752 seconds)

And time loops and I do it all over again.

(799 seconds)

And again.

(846 seconds)

And there is every possibility that this will never stop.

How do you get past a horror that is always present?

Is it even worth getting past if nothing can possibly matter anymore?

The anguish just feeds on itself as that thought reminds me that every one of those pops, bangs, and crashes was a person who had reached that conclusion just a little quicker than I had.

If I had the means, I would probably join them, dying a handful of seconds at a time, but I will have to suffice with my tears.

I will offer my grief to eternity and pour it out fresh every time it fills itself back up.

(893 seconds)

Like now.

“Son of a bitch! I can’t believe they did this to me.”

My shouts and curses were muffled by the— was that velvet?

The inky void is filled with the sound of the friction of my fingers attempting to gain purchase on the soft luxurious fabric, trying and failing to tear through the padding, the first in what will be an arduous journey to exact revenge on the people who have left me in this state.

At last, I find a seam, the scrabbling clawing racket giving way to the satisfying sound of fabric tearing. The velvet rent from the lining makes way for a sudden avalanche of polyester padding to fall into my face. Tucking it off to the side as well as I can, my fingers continue to explore what lies above me and discover a wooden surface so highly polished that the dense grain of the wood was nearly entirely hidden within its slick surface.

I strike the wood with the palm of my hand as hard as the six inches of clearance will allow. There is not even a hint of give to the wood. For all the good it did me, I might as well have been hitting solid stone.

“Hardwood, really? What is this mahogany?”

I relax into the absurdly comfortable bed of my casket fuming over the situation that I found myself in. The slow exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide in this dark hole in the ground leaves me with precious little breath left to call out my dying lament.

“How dare you waste all this money on a box for me to rot in. You could have cremated me and stuck me in a plastic bag. At least burning alive would have been cheap!”

With the last choking breath in my lungs, I managed to cough out, “I’m going to haunt every last one of you for this!”

I’m starting to rethink the wisdom behind the decision to take a half day today rather than burning an entire day of PTO. Between waiting until lunch to hustle out of work today and the type of public transportation that enables entire authoritarian regimes to rise to power, I am going to be late.

My tardiness is going to do nothing to combat the perceived flakiness of artists, even if the hope that my planned professional demeanor would combat that reputation was the kind of baseless optimism that can easily lead to accusations of flakiness in its own right. The place of the artist in society, in as much as we have a place at all, has been relegated to such a dusty corner of eccentricity that being considered flaky is probably a generous upgrade from the assumption of madness.

Art itself may not be madness, but still considering yourself an artist after all that has happened probably comes close. Look at me now, I’ve been thrown the smallest scrap of something that looks marginally like the future that I had pictured for myself and here I am tearing through the streets like, yes, a mad woman.

All of this rushing manages to have me rolling into the lobby at something resembling on time, even if I do still have an elevator ride, and a trek down the hallway in front of me that will qualify me as late, but not seriously so. That elevator ride turns out to be a blessedly solitary one that can be used to take several deep calming breaths to rein in my out-of-control nervous system, and a few dabs at my forehead with a tissue to keep the glow of my commute to a minimum.

By the time the elevator dinged at my destination on the seventh floor, I had managed to recapture the majority of the composure that had been leaking out of me over the last several blocks of my commute. The me who walked across the threshold into the waiting room for my appointment was a reasonable facsimile of the one who I hoped would show up here today.

It’s more crowded than expected and I lower myself into a chair next to a man, nearly as well-worn as his chipboard guitar case, who is sporting a balding scalp that still insisted on clinging to a rope of stone-gray ponytail. Ugh, musicians.

“Hi, I’m Jessica.” I turn to him and smile, “I’m a little late, they haven’t called me yet, have they?”

“No, you’re good. It’s not like they’re ever punctual themselves.” I must have disguised my initial distaste well because he seems like he’s just happy that someone has noticed that he isn’t part of the furniture.

I try to relax into the waiting room chair. It’s one of those ergonomic models that envisions that all people are the same shape and size, so rather than relax before my appointment, I find myself fighting off a chair back that seems intent on stabbing me in the spine.

“So, let me guess, a writer?” The musician is fighting a battle of his own, attempting to retain his brief promotion to fellow sentient being.

“Nope, I’m an artist.” I try not to be too offended by the pitying look that crosses his face as if anyone sitting in this room is in a better position than anyone else.

We are both rescued from this tortured interaction as a woman toting an iPad comes through an inner door and calls my name, “Jessica Wells?”

By way of answer, I pull myself out of the monstrosity masquerading as a chair and follow her into the adjoining room in the office. She motions me to a chair, a brother to those in the waiting room, and sits down on the opposite side of a utilitarian laminate-covered gray desk. I cringe inwardly as I notice that she is shackled to one of these chairs on a daily basis.

“Just a few questions before we start. Can you confirm that you are indeed Jessica Wells and that this is your first time contributing to Consort?” She stares at the tablet computer ready to tick the boxes that verify that I am who I say I am and that I am not here under false pretenses.

“Yes.”

“Have you, in the last five years, contributed to any entities who you know to be in direct competitor with Consort or any of its subsidiary corporations?”

“No, not to the best of my knowledge.”

“And you are aware that in agreeing to this commission, that Consort will retain all rights to the final product as well as a six-month right of first refusal for future work?”

“Yes.”

“Good, please sign here.” She turns the tablet to me where I awkwardly scrawl an approximation of my signature with my finger.

“Okay, follow me, and we’ll get you set up.”

She guides me into a long hallway of monochromatic dark gray, doors with brushed stainless steel knobs dotted the walls on either side at regular intervals. The low pile carpet of the hallway, likewise gray, swallows up the sound of our footsteps as we move to the far end of the corridor.

“You are going to be in room seventeen.” She opens the door and motions for me to go in first.

I take in the room, which is small and retains the same utilitarian lack of charm as the rest of the office but has the advantage of being stocked with brand-new art supplies. I take in the stack of heavily textured luxuriously thick paper, an assortment of graphite pencils, and best of all, a fresh set of pastels.

“Does everything seem to be to your liking?” She asked in such a way that in no way betrayed that this was a rhetorical question meant to elicit nothing but an answer in the affirmative.

“I think I have everything I need, thank you,” I said, fulfilling my end of the transaction.

“If you need anything else, just press the call button next to the door, and we’ll send someone down to help you. Take a few minutes to set up, your model should be here shortly.” She retreated to the hallway, closing the door behind her, leaving me alone to make this place my own.

It was curious to think that this was what passed for an art space. Nothing in the way of natural light, and aside from the tools of the trade, bright sticks of pigment almost glowing from their box, the room was a testament to sterility. It was something that had to be intentional because a space used by artists, especially a space designed to be used by artists, couldn’t help but pick up character, but there were no careless drips of paint on the floor or the table that held the supplies. The tilt-top desk that I would be working on showed none of the accidental cuts and scratches, smudges of graphite fingerprints, or the faded remnants of pigment that had been mostly but not quite cleaned away.

In a way, as much as it is shocking to the senses, it shouldn’t be surprising that this place wasn’t made with artists in mind. Artists are hardly more than an afterthought in the world at large, which is probably the biggest reason that I’m in this bleak lifeless room today. I should maybe just count my blessings that they haven’t moved to cubicles yet.

There was a thunk followed by two quick taps to announce the arrival of the model that I would be working with today. The awkwardness of the arrangement chose that moment to wash over me, culminating in a startled gasp that I did my best to transform into an invitation to enter. The part of my mind that I could trust in the moment attempted to sort the figure who emerged into the color palette that I would need to assemble for the project ahead of us.

He closed the door behind him and turned to find my hand offered in greeting, “Hi, I’m Jessica.”

“Marcus,” he said as he grasped my hand with a quick shake. If anything he seemed like he might be finding this more awkward than I was. His eyes darted around the cramped space searching for something to anchor himself to. “Do you have any idea how this is supposed to work?”

“Oh, so you’re a newbie to all of this, too. I think it’s pretty straightforward, you can sit over there on that stool, and I’ll adjust some lighting then we can get started.” I said, trying to exert some control over the situation. This might be far outside of the norm for me, and apparently him, but at its base, it is still just art, which I know.

I turned to see how Marcus was getting acquainted with the room only to have the question of his own timidity answered as I found him pulling his black t-shirt over his head exposing a lean and muscled midsection.

“Marcus, I don’t know what they told you, but it’s not that kind of modeling.”

“Oh, oh, I just assumed…” he stammered as he lowered his shirt. “I guess I was just thinking, you know back in art school, figure study classes, that kind of thing.” He was embarrassed but was playing it off better than I would have been able to manage if our roles had been reversed.

“You’re a fellow art school refugee, then?” I asked thinking that we may have found something to keep us afloat through this session. The prospect of spending the next couple hours sitting here quietly staring at each other hadn’t been a pleasant one.

“Kind of. I only took a semester or so of classes. Saw the way the wind was blowing, you know.”

“Yeah… that wind didn’t really start to kick up until my last semester, so I think I may have the distinction of being part of the most unemployable graduating class of what has stereotypically been an unemployable education.” It was the kind of gallows humor that is only really funny to someone else who has seen the rope swinging. He clearly got it though, there was a sadness in his dark eyes that communicated an anticipated future that had been pulled out from under him, even if he had at least been spared some of the heavier doses of student loan debt.

“That’s definitely been the reputation, my parents were always supportive, but you could tell it was that kind of support that was against their own better judgment. My Mom was just a little too happy when I decided to start nursing school.” I found myself adjusting my perception of the man in front of me. I wasn’t wrong about the sadness that I had seen a moment before but there was steel behind his eyes as well that I could recognize in the lack that I saw in myself.

“Sounds about right. Up until the very end, my parents were trying to convince me that art would be something that I could do on the side after I figured out something more practical to do with my life. To their credit, they weren’t too unbearable when it turned out that they were right, though I’m fairly certain that even their most pessimistic take on the field wasn’t anywhere near as bad as where we ended up.” I’ve always hated the word bitter, it’s a word that seems to contain within its own definition a judgment against the validity of your feelings. A bitterness really can be found underlying my own story, though, because there actually is a sagging beam that undergirds who I am now that constantly feels like it’s threatening to allow me to collapse in on myself.

“Okay, so yeah, you can sit there on the stool.” I decided to allow the work to fill up the silence that had settled between us. “It’s mostly just going to be a head and shoulders composition, but if you could lean forward and rest your chin on your hand. From what I understand they can never get enough hands.” As he settled into the pose, I adjusted the lighting to provide something a little more dynamic than the harsh office lighting that we had been dumped into.

“Like this?” He slumped forward into a heavy brooding pose of contemplation before he relaxed into a good-natured smile.

“Perfect, but just relax, give me something natural.” And he did, the goofiness fell off of him and I was left with the hurt yet resilient young man that I had perceived in the short interaction that we had muddled through so far.

I retreated to the tilt-top desk on the opposite side of our cramped little room and started to quickly lay down a preliminary sketch. Once I got the pose and the basic contours established I could let Marcus relax a little bit from the pose. I’m not sure exactly what they look for in their models, but he made an interesting subject, the tight curls of his hair contrasting with the sharper lines and angles of his face, and his long thin fingers offering something almost surreal to the composition.

I felt myself falling into a rhythm. This was a process that I worried might have become foreign to me, but my hand and eye were every bit as coordinated as the pair had been when putting pencil to paper was a daily exercise. The basic lines and shapes of the composition were coming together and I could feel an anticipation start to build as I was about to transition over to color.

“You can relax, I’m done with the initial sketch.” His relative amateur status as a model had been starting to show as I could start to see the stiffness setting into his shoulders, and the discomfort starting to creep into his face. “So, how did you get roped into modeling?”

“I still have six months or so until I’ll be out of school, and money has been pretty nonexistent in the meantime. My brain still goes back to art, even if it isn’t really my own art, and this didn’t seem like it would be too taxing with my school schedule. What do you do with your time when you’re not living out your dreams?” There’s a hint of a teasing smile in that question that I feel compelled to answer with an equally teasing glare of annoyance.

“It turns out that even though they hide us behind a labyrinth of text bots and menu options, they still haven’t found a computer program that people can satisfyingly berate. I work in customer service for a health insurance company. They’ve managed to automate or offshore most of the routine issues, so my days are filled with people whose medications we refuse to pay for even though we’ve been paying for them for the last decade, others who aren’t suffering quite enough for the operations they need until they have jumped through a few more hoops, and the people who realize that they pay several times their deductible each year in premiums for an insurance policy that acts like little more than a coupon booklet. Then we are required to ask if they would “pretty please” fill out a survey to tell us how unendingly satisfied they are with our service only to be called into quality assurance meetings every month because, of course, they are never remotely satisfied. Why would they be?” This rant served as background music for the laying down of the reds and oranges and purples that were ultimately going to shine through to the finished portrait. I continued blending with the tip of my finger and working the pigment into the heavy grain of the paper as the diatribe rolled over Marcus.

“Wow, that’s a lot… and how do you keep yourself sane dealing with that every day?” He’s trying to keep things light while affirming that my life does indeed seem like it sucks. A tricky balance.

“I do this, well not this, not the commission. I create, you may laugh but continuing to paint really does keep me from tipping over the edge.” It’s been a long time since I have done something even remotely like this and the intimacy of it is likely what is prompting all of the oversharing.

We fall back into another pause in our conversation as I have Marcus resume his pose so that I can fine-tune some of the deeper shadows. The medium lends itself to the soft-focused colors of a dream, but Marcus is demanding a work of contrasts and the rigid deep shadows are going to play an outsized role in a composition that will flow organically otherwise.

“So, just for yourself?” He breaks the silence, still wondering how I’ve held onto art despite all momentum moving in the opposite direction. He is maybe even searching to see if there might be a way for it to work for him again.

“No, I’ve never been able to create just for myself. People will say that the only audience that matters when it comes to art is ourselves, but that has never made any sense to me. Sure, a large part of art is obviously sel-expression, so I need to be satisfied with the final product, but art is meant to communicate and I’ve never been satisfied with talking to myself.” I start to layer in the rich multifaceted browns and the muted grays, the yellows where I will start to build the highlights.

“Then, where do you find your audience?” There really is a pining nature that has crept into the question, like I am about to give him the answer to keeping art alive in an artless world.

“You’ll laugh,” I say, sure that he will.

“I won’t.” Dead serious, equally confident that he won’t.

“Do you know that park near the corner of Fifth and Penn?” I ask, hoping he follows me.

“Yeah, it was never my park, but I grew up a few streets down.” The interest still in his eyes.

“Sidewalk chalk. There’s a path through the playground from the parking lot to the tennis courts, after work and in the morning most weekends I draw there. Sometimes it’s fantasy landscapes for the kids. Other times I might have a bored parent put up with me using them for inspiration. Every once in a while someone will toss me a couple dollars, I started bringing a hat. It lets me fool myself into thinking that I’m actually a professional.” I didn’t notice myself doing it, but I had paused my work on the portrait as I started sketching out instead the part of my life that I had managed to steal back from the world that had no real use for it. “It’s actually how I ended up here. One of the dads from the private school up the street was waiting for his daughter and had a connection where he was able to pull a string or two for me.”

A look of disappointment, or maybe confusion crosses his face, though he’s courteous enough to try to hide it once he realizes what he’s doing.

“Look, I get it. I’m pretty much a street… a sidewalk performer, but it’s what I have available to me.” I pointedly return to the painting, focusing on the sad persistent eyes that had captured me so soon after we first met. The dual nature of them calling out both to the damaged part of me that stubbornly refuses to heal because allowing the wound to close feels like a betrayal, and the hopeful aspect that says that there may be new dreams and fresh narratives on the other side of pain. The beauty is held in the tension between the two.

“The last thing I want to do is discourage you. I’m glad that you have found a way to continue creating even with the limited options left available to us. It just never stops being sad that we have allowed ourselves to be reduced to this.” That tension breaks for a moment and his eyes give in to despair, one that he has convinced himself that he hasn’t been running away from.

“What you are doing is still wortwhile. It’s not as though there’s any nobility lacking in training to help people who are sick and hurting.” I find myself in the unlikely role of trying to rekindle the hope in those captivating eyes. The work itself is coming to a head as the hidden depth starts to reveal itself in the highlights that I’m adding to his curves and angles. It’s work that comes together in a way that I hadn’t noticed it never quite does on a sidewalk.

“Marcus, I lose sight of it more often than not, but I really do believe that we can’t continue in the direction that we’re going. People are eventually going to realize that they are missing something vital from their lives, and the pendulum will start swinging back in our direction again. I want to be here for it when it does.” That seems to do the trick. While I’m not entirely sure that I have enough optimism in me to believe what I just told him, I have clearly just reminded him that he believes it.

“Thanks, Jessica, I needed that.” He moves to get up from his stool, and I nod for him to come over.

Marcus leans over my shoulder taking in the image of himself as I see him and as my hand has translated that vision to the page. I look up at him and see that he doesn’t entirely recognize himself. Not that I have missed the likeness, but that there is a part of himself that he has never really been able to see with his own eye, but has saturated the page in my representation of him. He sees who he can be to people and how it would have been a gift in the world that he imagined for himself, but will work every bit as well in the one that he will actually exist in.

It was then that inspiration hit me, “Just one more thing.”

Grabbing a small palette of colors, I start to rework the edge of the hand draped across his face, adding the slightest hint of a knuckle for a sixth finger to its contour.

“Wait, what is…” his confusion turned to delight as it hit him and he let out a small but satisfied laugh. “That’s perfect. Really though, this is beautiful work.”

And because it was work, just a side hustle for the both of us, we took that opportunity to part even though something significant had passed between us in the short time that we had spent together. Marcus departed and left me alone again in the room. I did a little light compulsive cleaning even though I knew that it was pointless. They would begin the process of erasing any evidence that I had been here before I even made it out of the building.

I was spraying some of the provided fixative to the painting, so that Marcus would stay where he was on the page, noting that this happened to be far from the well-ventilated area required for doing this when another knock came at the door.

It was a different employee, not the one who had shown me in, though the similarity was striking. As if the company was striving for a certain level of uniformity in their workforce, which of course, they probably were.

“If you are finished, we can head to my office and get everything finalized.” She said with a posture that subtly, but definitely, was encouraging me to leave.

As slowly as her patience would likely allow, I completed the final satisfying step in the process and pulled up the tape, leaving clean white borders along the edge, one of my favorite rituals of the finished work. I rose from my chair and stepped through the door, leaving behind that drab room that had for a short time been anything but.

I trailed the corporate doppelgänger down the hall to her office, passing once again the nondescript doors that assuredly led to identical nondescript rooms. When I entered her office, I handed over the painting, laying it on the desk in such a way that I could take it in one more time before I left.

“Was your experience satisfactory?” The employee, still conspicuously lacking anything like a name tag or identifying marker on her person or within the office, met my eyes after the most fleeting of glances at the work in front of her.

“Yeah, everything was great.” The stock answer that came so easily to the lips when you know that you are completing a question in a survey where you are being asked to lie.

“You provided a direct deposit account in your initial paperwork, so you should see your payment within the next three to seven days. If you don’t have any further questions or comments, you are free to go. We will be in contact if we require any future work from you.” She made eye contact just long enough to verify that I had processed my dismissal. She gave me a small strained smile that added any needed punctuation to the remark.

As I was gathering myself to leave, she snatched the painting from the desk and moved to the back of the office where a large flatbed scanner was housed. I watched as she placed it face down on the glass and closed the lid. She tapped a few buttons and the curiously loud whir of a high-resolution scan started.

I lingered a bit longer than was probably wise, but I found it impossible to uproot myself from the spot, almost as if I would be leaving my work abandoned if I were able to pull myself away from this desk. The whirring scanner came to a stop, and the employee gave a quick glance at a nearby monitor to verify that the scan had been successful.

She removed the painting from the scanner and with a fluid decisive motion she folded it in half, Marcus reduced to his curls and those eyes. She took two steps to her left and fed it into what I can only assume is a particularly heavy-duty paper shredder, the face that I had studied for the day disappearing into the machine, having been reduced to what must have been some impressively colorful strips of paper, left to mingle with brothers and sisters who would join him in never seeing the light of day.

I had definitely overstayed my welcome, so I made my way back out of the office and through the door at the end of the hallway, back through the waiting room that had significantly thinned since my brief stay in it. My eyes swept the room and found a face or two that still contained the life that I had found in Marcus, but mostly what I found were echoes of myself. People just trying to hold on, grasping onto whatever opportunities still existed to be this thing that they had so thoroughly grounded their identity in.

As I exited the building and passed a drone freshening up the graffiti in the adjoining alleyway, I thought of the park, the little handhold in the world that I had carved out for myself, and wondered how long I would be able to hold on. I thought of the Marcus in the painting, the one whose eyes brought me hope and I wondered how much of that was in him and how much of it I had pulled out of him because it was what I needed to see.

Maybe it didn’t matter.

Maybe one of those vital things that we have lost by letting go of the reins of art is the ability to give breath to things that we know to be true even if we can’t see them. I needed to see hope, and with pastel and page, I had crafted it into existence. Those hopeful eyes would carry me into the future, and they promise that I will find art there.

“I have reason to believe that my mother is dead.” It was blunt and to the point. It was the type of statement that someone like me envisions when they get into this type of profession. The reality of it, while frequently seedy, is often far more mundane. This was anything but.

“What makes you think that something has happened to your mother?” I was trying to establish a baseline for what it was that I would be looking into.

“A little bird told me.” She said.

The evasive answer threw me for a second. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons that someone might not want to volunteer that information, most of them meant trouble. It was likely not in my best interest to fight over this first question, so I moved on. “What can you tell me about your mother?”

“I haven’t seen my mother in over a decade, she is what polite people might call reclusive.” She volunteered.

“What about not-so-polite people?” I’ve done this long enough to know that polite people can be every bit as dangerous as the rude ones, but the rude ones often give you more information.

“My mother didn’t have much use for people, polite or not. Believe me when I say that her aversion to people was extreme. It’s possible that she hasn’t encountered another living soul in years.” This was another evasive answer, though a more subtle one. There was something about all of this that she didn’t want to tell me, and I would be lying if I said that it didn’t make the whole thing more attractive.

“What is it exactly that you would like me to do for you?” It was a question that she couldn’t dodge if she actually wanted to hire me. If I’m being honest, she had the hook in me from those very first words, and I was ready to be reeled in.

“It’s simple, I need confirmation that she really is gone. I said that I had reason to believe it, but I need to know that it’s true. Nothing more than that.” She said.

“You don’t need to know how it happened? If there was any… foul play?” I was doing the cliched private investigator thing, and I knew it, but I was disappointed that she didn’t want more.

“It’s callous, I’m aware of that, but I don’t care what happened. I just need to know that she’s dead.”

#

I took the case because of course I did. The money was good-ish, and something about her blunt disregard for her mother left me thinking that there was more to all of this than she had told me, even if all I was doing was searching for a body.

She was able to provide me with a GPS location for the house, but not much else, she had never been there herself. It was truly remote. Her mother apparently lived in the literal middle of a forest.

The road that I found myself on, once paved but long since turned to gravel and potholes, with actual streams crossing it at some points would be seen as sufficiently remote for most people. The few houses set back off the road looked like they were rotting on their foundations, in most cases with a roof in one state of collapse or another. The faded flags of long ago wars, which they still insist on backing the wrong side of, drooped on the twine that lashed them to front porch railings. The assumption that they were abandoned was instantly rebutted by the rusted bicycles in the driveway and plastic toys piled and littered through the front yard.

The road wound through the mountainside, pinned between jutting rocks from the hillside and a steep fall to the stream bed below. It was the type of road that constantly threatened to throw a car coming in the opposite direction in your path, a prospect that at its worst could result in tragedy, but at the very least promised comedy. The road finally dead-ended mercifully at a turn-around that had once served as part of a now abandoned coal mining operation, the infrastructure of which was left to rust away and attract the attention of the occasional gawking hiker.

A pre-existing trail suited at least the beginnings of my purposes, having been cut into the woods for the benefit of the aforementioned hikers. There were other signs of its previous life as a place of industry as I passed the foundation of an old building overgrown with weeds, the crumbling stone the only evidence left, the wood rotted away, any metal either taken as scrap or having long since burrowed itself into the earth.

At this early point of the trail, little shrines had cropped up seemingly honoring nothing much more than this place’s previous life as a dumping ground for the locals. Among the shattered brown glass of beer bottles rose makeshift sculptures constructed of old mattress springs and bottomless pots having long given up on their fiction of being constructed of stainless steel. Perched upon a boulder along the path, was an old car mirror, the glass miraculously intact, but the chrome old and pitted with rust.

These artifacts of the frayed edge of society that I was leaving behind quickly thinned, and left me with a trail that had started to become overgrown, evidence that it had been largely abandoned by the weekend adventurers that it had hoped to attract.

The trail dwindled to nothing far sooner than I would have expected, leaving me to make my own way, periodically checking my bearings on the maps app on my phone, a detail that I was self-consciously aware was anachronistic in the tale that I seemed to have been dropped into.

I was hours into the woods before I noticed it, but though it was mid-afternoon, the forest seemed to grow darker with every step. As the way darkened, the trail started to reappear, almost as if the house I was seeking out was drawing me in. The type of feeling that you would assume might go through the mind of a mouse when they miraculously stumble upon a large chunk of delicious cheese.

I emerged into what qualified as a clearing in this dense section of the deep forest, the trees crossing their limbs in the canopy, in a conspiracy to keep this place in a perpetual state of twilight through the brightest hours of the day.

In the middle of the clearing, was a house.

#

House was perhaps an exaggeration, it was a small cramped looking structure. The only real thing that set it apart from a simple hunter’s cabin was its one concession to ornament, the trim of the house was embellished with curling details along the roofline, mimicking the look of clinging vines. The part of my brain that I often associate with a tingling sensation on the back of my neck felt it important to note that these details were called gingerbread.

There was an aura about the house, or more particularly, a lack of aura. Something about this house lent the overwhelming sensation that it had been alive, but that same intuition assured me that whatever life had previously inhabited the house had left it some time ago. The house was clearly deserted.

Circling to the back of the house, I encountered animal pens, maybe for dogs or chickens. The interior of each was scattered with small bones and in the corner, a metal pail filled to the top with a putrid filth that I dared not disturb. The pen was open, so whatever had been inside was now long gone.

Another pail, this one empty, lay on its side thrown casually aside before the back door which was standing wide open. The overall sense of the scene in front of me was one of abandonment. The sense that I was being lured into a trap remained, but was now paired with the feeling that anyone who ended up trapped here would be willing to gnaw their own leg off to get away.

I stepped into the now verifiably vacant shack, that first step introducing a resonant creak into the single room of the house, sending more than one creeping or scurrying creature into hiding. A small bed sat moldering in one corner, and a small square table was home to an old rusty bird cage, its door hanging open, mimicking the evident fleeing in the rest of the house. The opposite side of the house constituted the kitchen, dominated by a large old-fashioned iron cooking stove.

After taking a quick inventory of the room, my eye was drawn to a dusty old wooden box beside the tiny table in the corner. Several small items were splashed across the floor surrounding it. On closer inspection, my interest in them was validated, they were roughly cast coins about the size of a silver dollar. Picking one up, I rubbed away the dust and grime that now so thoroughly coated it to find that they were gold, of a vintage that I could hardly guess at.

I opened the chest, my mind smoothly transitioning from the word box to the word chest once there promised to be treasure inside, and it gave way with a light whine of the hinges. The inside was less impressive than I had hoped, though the corners still sparkled with quite a few additional gold pieces, stray pearls, and even a number of large jewels. Something about the state of the chest led me to believe that this was the remnant of a much larger fortune. The coins on the floor, the remaining treasure heaped in the corners painted a picture of someone having made off with the majority of what had been contained within this box.

I was here for the simple act of confirming the end of someone’s life, but the questions surrounding what had happened here and why were already starting to mount and despite my client’s apparent disinterest in details, I was starting already to crave them. I needed to search the room, and the sparseness of the habitation meant that there was very little searching that was going to take place before the part that I had been hired for was over.

I decided to check under the bed first, it was as dusty and spider-ridden as you might expect, and also turned out to be the home of most of the owner’s few meager possessions. There was not, it turned out, a discarded body under the bed. The feeling of relief was quickly chased by the foreboding that I was one step closer to locating what I was looking for.

I crossed the room and made a cursory search behind the curtains hanging from the counter that were serving as cabinets, a doubtful flick to the side knowing where my more likely target lay. As I stood in front of the iron cooking stove, I let myself think, just for a moment, that my intuition of what had happened here might have been entirely misguided. My client had never given me any concrete reason that she was sure that there was a body to be found. I was going to open that door, and at worst, I was going to scare a family of mice. There had been no murder here, just a little old lady who had abandoned this old shack when life in the woods had gotten too hard for her.

With a deep breath, I kneeled down to have a direct sight line of whatever it was that I was about to reveal. The stove itself had been well-maintained over the years, it wasn’t new, but it showed little of the neglect that had overtaken the rest of the house. When I turned the bar to unlock the door to the wood-fired oven within, it gave the slightest grind of metal on metal as the clasp released, and the door swung heavily but smoothly on its hinges.

I’m not sure what I expected to find, the charred remains were startling, horrifying even, but the blackened bones within were in a relaxed pose, arms crossed at the chest, shoulders resting on one side of the oven, and knees tucked up on the other.

A figure resigned to its fate.

A closer inspection showed signs that this state of repose was not easily come by, several finger bones lay in her lap, knuckles shattered, a valiant effort to free herself before deciding that dignity in death was the last gift that she could give herself.

I pulled myself out of the crouch that I had relaxed into and strode to the back door to catch my breath. I don’t think that there was any part of me that thought that I was going to find a kindly old woman who had passed in her sleep, but the nature of her death was shocking and the furthest thing from natural. Nothing about this felt natural.

A sick sensation hit the pit of my stomach. It would have been easy to tell myself that I was reacting to the gruesome nature of this woman’s death, but there was no one here to lie to. The feeling was disappointment. I had done that job that I had been paid to do, and the only thing left was to snap a few pictures and hike back out, but as much as my client purported to not care about what had happened here, I did. There was a puzzle to piece together, a knot to untangle, and I could never resist either of those things.

It was there, leaning against the door frame, pining for the mystery laid out in front of me, that I saw what I had missed when I had first come inside. Sitting there, in the dust of the path that had been worn by many years of exits and entrances, were two gold coins.

#

The body. Just confirming the death of my client’s mother. That was the only reason I am here. I was explicitly told that she had no interest at all in finding out what had happened to her. That was an attitude I would never understand. Though, I suppose, I never knew the woman’s mother. I have seen my share of fallings out among families in my time in this industry and callous disregard would hardly be the worst that I have come across.

The mostly empty chest inside. The scattering of coins just outside of it. These two coins. My intuition was telling me that this looked like a robbery that turned into a murder, or maybe the other way around. The whole scene gave the impression of someone trying to flee from it as quickly as they could, and people who move quickly tend to be sloppy. If there are two coins here, I might find more elsewhere. If I find enough, I might just have a trail to follow.

The area surrounding the house appeared to have been largely kept clear through simple foot traffic, so that with no feet remaining to traffic it, it was quickly being reclaimed by the forest. I hadn’t missed anything in my initial search around the animal pens, just the small bones and the bucket. My search of the front of the house didn’t turn up anything other than some glass that had been broken out of a window. If I didn’t know any better I would have said that someone had been gnawing on the corner, but in any case, no further dropped treasure.

The far side of the house finally gave me another data point to consider, but it wasn’t in any way what I thought I was looking for. A heap of tangled thistles stood right at the edge of the forest that no one had ever considered taming. On closer inspection, the heap was not the thistles at all, but something that the vegetation had chosen to grow among.

It was a pile of bones.

The heap of skeletal remains did not in any way give me the courtesy of being ambiguous about their origin. They were human bones. Many of them had broken down into shards and further to dust, but there were several skulls in the mix. Some of them were clearly from full-grown adults, some of them… were not. The smallest of which fit comfortably in the curve of my hand, reminding me completely against my will of holding a softball.

That was the point at which my stomach decided to evacuate everything inside of it. I had my wits about me enough to avoid vomiting directly into these haphazardly discarded remains, but as I was coughing the last bit of bile out of my throat, I spotted a curious smooth shape in the weeds. I wiped off my mouth on the sleeve of my jacket and crouched down for a closer look.

It was a ruby. The deep red color had largely hidden itself in the leaf litter of the forest floor, but it couldn’t help but reflect the scant light that was struggling to make its way through the canopy. There was the slightest hint of what looked like a deer path just a few yards in front of it.

It seemed like a cruel trick. One mystery stacked right on top of another. The one headed into the forest, while the other didn’t seem to lead anywhere from here. If I’m being honest, there was a part of me that didn’t want to find out where that pile of bones had come from. It lent some extra weight to the feeling of that mystery being a dead end.

I turned back, being careful not to step in the mess that I had just created, hesitated in the agony of having to choose, and set off into the forest.

#

Discipline was required in the early going. My enthusiasm to chase after those who fled the house could have easily led me to pursue a wrong trail, triggering the need to retrace my steps and start over. I went slow, eyes combing the ground on half-formed paths or in the direction where the trees and undergrowth allowed the least resistance. It turned out to be easier than I had anticipated. The search was aided by a thinning in the tree tops that allowed more daylight through as I created distance between myself and the house. If it had been a fresh trail, I might not have even needed to pause. They had either taken far more than they could carry or whatever it was that they were carrying their newfound riches in had a sizable hole in it.

Jewels and pearls and gold coins were dropped at regular intervals, it was almost like following a trail of breadcrumbs. A phrase that stubbornly resisted revealing to me how it was that it had entered into the common vernacular.

I spent the better part of the afternoon following the trail and filling my pockets with treasure. I was able, with effort, to keep the image of that tiny skull out of my mind.

I spent the better part of the afternoon following the trail and filling my pockets with treasure. One obstacle eventually presented itself, a duck pond where the trail seemed to end. Right on the muddy bank was a roughly cast gold coin, covered in muck but clearly pointing to a trail that had gone into the pond. There wasn’t a boat, on this side or the other, yet all evidence pointed to them having crossed.

One of the ducks, an enormous one, started giving me his attention, a certain hostility in his eye that did not seem entirely duck-like. He lunged in my direction, all wings and beak and naked aggression, and I admit, I ran. I ran for my life from a pissed-off duck.

I stopped as the quacking and flapping died away in the distance, gulping air and trying to avoid thinking of how ridiculous I must have just looked. The pond was large, as far as ponds went. It would have been far preferable to cross if that had been an option, but it wouldn’t be an unreasonable departure to just walk around it.

I was wet and dirty and not a little miserable by the time I reached the spot opposite where I had started, the most likely spot where they would have ended up if they had crossed, but I didn’t find gold or jewels or pearls. I did see duck prints. In the muddy earth that led away from the pond was a trail of webbed feet. It was ridiculous, but I followed them.

Being much more consistent, fresher, and still easy to see, I sprinted in the wake of the duck. It must have heard me because it came, once more flapping out of the trees trying to chase me off again. I stood my ground this time, and frustrated in his attempt, he spit a mouthful of treasure at my feet.

Had the duck been trying to cover over the trail? That’s ludicrous, right? Ducks generally do not fall into the category of accessories after the fact in potential murder cases. Possible criminal activity aside, the duck was staring up at me, what could not possibly be a threat behind his eyes. Something in my own expression must have communicated that I had understood the gist of what that glare had meant because he walked past me and returned himself to his business on the pond.

#

In the end, as odd as it was, the encounter with the duck was not as big a hindrance to my search as it might have been, as I am curiously positive that the duck had hoped that it would be. I found myself tracking webbed footprints, then the disturbance of the undergrowth that resulted from a duck shuffling through the woods. As well-suited as they were for the water and the sky, their skills on land, and particularly in this environment were limited.

It wasn’t long before I was once again searching the ground for flashes of gems and the glint of the sun striking gold on the ground in front of me. Back in the flow of the hunt, I found myself falling into a rhythm of ducking under low branches and pushing through thorn bushes until I once again came into a clearing.

It looked like it had been used several times over as a base camp of sorts. They were the remains of a not-small fire near the center, and the trees in the area showed signs of being thinned for firewood. Next to the burnt-out section of the forest floor that marked the former site of a bonfire was a length of tree trunk, roughly as long as I was tall, that had evidently served as a bench. I took a seat, deciding that this was as good a time as any to take a break. My pursuit thus far had been unbroken, and it seemed like it was about time to collect my thoughts.

It was hard to escape the thought that my client’s mother had been a monster, no matter how nasty her end had been. There may have been another explanation for what I saw there, but my imagination was failing me in what that might be. Was I pursuing murderers or potential victims? At this point, I think I was just pursuing answers. Maybe if I found them, I might even get some clue as to what was up with that duck.

I found myself absently running my hand along the grain of the bench beside me. The was a deep groove in the wood, probably just an errant blow with the axe when they were bringing the tree down. But when I shifted my gaze down to where my hand was examining the groove, there was a dark stain on the wood as well. Not a small one. It wasn’t new, and maybe my mind had been prepped by the day to jump to the conclusion, but this was almost certainly blood. It was hard to tell if there was enough to indicate an accident or a fatal injury, the ground would have drunk most of the blood in either case, but again, conclusions were well within jumping range.

I circled the clearing, trying to locate anything that might point me in the direction of what had occurred here. Nothing.

A thought circled my mind. I’m not sure if it would be fitting or ironic, but it seemed too right to not check.

I returned to my spot near the fire pit. I pushed the largest log out of the ring of ash with the toe of my boot. I brushed aside some of the smaller pieces, and there they were… bones. For the second time today, I had found what was left of a human being burned to nothing but ash and blackened bone.

It was difficult to make solid conclusions from the burnt remains but it appeared that the clavicle, one hand, and a vertebra in the neck had been crushed. I picture flashed in my head of this person, propped on the log near the fire, hands raised in meager defense from an axe that would sink its head into them twice before it blessedly came to an end. At least they were dead when they were burned, not a blessing I ever thought that I would consider.

It could hardly be a coincidence that this body was here, right along the path that I was following, just another of the breadcrumbs that I was following to my ultimate destination. That was how my mind had to categorize it, at least. There was no room in my head to actually process the things that I had seen today. I could almost feel my brain protecting itself by turning anything but the facts surrounding these two bodies into a blind spot. Processing was something that I could set aside for later, must set aside for later, I needed to press on.

It took a few minutes to find the trail again, a sapphire at the far side of the clearing. The sun was starting to get low in the sky, and the natural darkness of twilight imitated the unnatural gloom that had fallen over the shack where this trail had begun. I took a flashlight from the pocket of my jacket, deploying the tiny searchlight across the likelier gaps in the trees. It wasn’t long before my precious breadcrumbs led me out to an area well-traveled enough to qualify as a proper path. The jewels and coins continued, but they were now following the well-worn trail as well, until at last, the forest spat me out on a gravel road, directly across from a house.

#

If anything, this house may have been worse off than those that greeted me on my drive in. The house sat at the bottom of a steep hill, a stream running along the base of it. On a rainy day, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see some of the jutting rocks on that hillside turn into temporary waterfalls. The house itself was almost more mildew than house at this point, the roof was essentially a sheet of thriving moss. The structure was being devoured by the surrounding moisture, it was hard to believe that anyone lived inside of it.

For a moment, I nearly allowed myself to believe that the house was empty. Oh well, no one was home, I’ll just have to make my way back to the city and report my findings, no need to dwell on this any further.

It was just a moment.

I took the three steps up to the front porch, concerned that it might give way beneath me. For good reason, to the left of the door was a roughly foot-sized hole in the lumber. Taking the opportunity afforded by the hole to locate a support beam to place my weight on, I stood and knocked on the door.

One more time, I let myself entertain the fantasy that no one was home, that there would be no answer to my tapping on the front door. The fantasy quickly thwarted, a head of dirty blonde hair appeared about chest high in the doorway. A pair of pale blue eyes looked up at me, or more accurately, past me, close enough to eye contact to be seen as acknowledgment but not a bit more. I dug in my pocket and pulled out a handful of gold coins.

“Umm… I think these may belong to you.” I hadn’t given much thought to how any of this might play out if I actually did come face-to-face with the subject of my search. To his credit, the boy at the door was able to mostly conceal his startled reaction to the proffered treasure before him.

A girl, very clearly his sister, appeared behind him and stared not just right at me, but through me, with those same pale blue eyes. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Well, I just, well…” The girl was unnerving and had caught me off-guard. The day had stripped away more of my reserve of calm than I had realized. I took a deep breath and dipped into what was left of it. “There was a house in the woods. I found a woman there. The remains of one. The trail led here.”

“You a cop?” She had the look of a rubber band that had been pulled back in preparation to snap someone.

“No, not a cop. If you know what I saw in that cabin, and I think that you do, I’m sure that you can understand my interest in what happened there.” I saw the slightest amount of slack return to her posture. The boy was barely there, the silent stare that he had greeted me with was just as vacant as when I first knocked.

There was still no indication that they were about to volunteer any information, so I continued. “I saw something else there, outside the cabin…”

“The bones?” She interrupted me quietly but firmly. The tension had almost entirely fallen away from her, and she looked like a child for the first time since she had stepped in to speak for her brother.

“Yes, was she…”

“She was going to eat us.” There was relief all over her face. This stranger who knew what they had done, wanted to know what had been done to them.

It was shocking, but it also fit the information that I had available to me. She went on and told me the rest of the story. Some of it almost had to be trauma-induced nonsense, the bit about the house being constructed of candy in particular, and their own encounter with a duck, but the core of the story, lost in the woods, taken in by an old woman who turned out to be some sort of cannibal, jumping on the only opportunity they had for escape. It was a harrowing tale.

The rumble of an engine accompanied by the crackle of shifting gravel and the thunk of an unavoidable pothole came ricocheting off the hillside. An old rust-eaten Dodge Caravan with faux woodgrain came to a skidding stop in front of the house, the driver’s side door popping open while the car was still swaying on its suspension. A blonde man with an impressive mustache emerged from the van shouting.

“Get the hell away from my kids!” The imperative was immediately made half as difficult as the boy shot off of the porch to the man’s side. He wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulder, a protective and calming gesture. “What are you doing here?”

“He came from the house, dad. We told him what happened.” The girl jumped in, answering for me.

“Is that so? You made quite a hike to get all the way out here from there.” Some calm seemed to be seeping into the man’s demeanor, perhaps realizing that I had no ill intentions toward his children. Maybe also catching on that I am all by myself and in no real position to be a threat to anyone. “Why don’t we go in the house, you look like you could use a drink.”

I feel the tension go out of my muscles along with the tension that drained from the situation. The man came up the steps and motioned for me to go in first. As I turned to go through the door I felt the momentary sensation of him making contact with the back of my head and heard the load crack of my face being driven into the doorframe before everything went black.

#

When I come to, my hands and feet are tied, and I’m laying face down in the dirt. The impulse to check the throbbing gash in my head is overwhelming, but again, no hands. I let out a frustrated grunt, and give a token struggle against the ropes that I know will be fruitless. A pair of well-worn boots appear in front of my face long enough to see the kick to my stomach coming.

“You aren’t taking my children away from me.” The voice comes out as a snarl. My mind conjures up pictures of wolves, not men, at the sound of it. “I will never let that happen again.”

The boots keep coming in and out of my line of sight as he paces back and forth, working himself up to something. The something that he is working himself up to is plain, and I am not currently seeing a way to avoid it. In a bid to get a better look at where I am and what is going on, I wriggle myself onto my back, a move that earns me a kick in the side.

“Your kids were safe. I was half convinced the woman had it coming before I even heard their story.” I think most of those words actually got out. My mouth was dry, my head was swimming, and the fresh pain of what might be a couple broken ribs was radiating through my side. “I just needed to know.”

The pacing continued, though it had taken on a slower less manic pace. From experience, this generally meant that actual contemplation was taking over for the bombardment of thought that had preceded it. Given how dire the situation had looked, a return to reason should work in my favor.

The pacing stopped. He kneeled down next to my bound body and I let myself hope that he was about to set me free. Instead, he leaned in close and said, “and the other body, do you expect me to believe that you don’t know anything about that one?”

He motioned over my shoulder to what I suddenly realized was the bonfire I had stopped at in the woods, the charred logs… and bones having plainly been disturbed. It was then that it hit me.

“Your wife.” It wasn’t a question, and he knew that it wasn’t, but the man gave me a nod in acknowledgment. He grabbed me up by the arm and dragged me over to the log that had served as his chopping block. He propped me up in a sitting position and got to work making a fire of the wood that he had gathered while I was unconscious.

“I would never have hurt my children.” He said as he worked. “Not if she hadn’t talked me into it.”

I nodded, doing the math that it might be in my best interest to not contradict the madman who was about to kill me.

“She just kept picking and picking and picking.” He continued. “She was hungry, we were all hungry. She convinced me, talked me into it. Said we would all starve if we didn’t do something about it.”

I made my face do the thing that was supposed to convey understanding, sympathy. Perhaps not in an entirely convincing fashion.

“The first time, when they found their way back, I was so relieved.” He added.

“The first time?” It came out of my mouth before I could think what I was saying.

He turned a cool look in my direction. “Yes, the first time. We set them out in the woods, here, in fact. We left them here, but they found their way back. The boy had left a trail of flints to follow back.”

“But you did it again?” I replied, apparently committed to abandoning my play at sympathy.

“Well, nothing had changed.” The man went on. “We didn’t magically have more food just because I was happy that my kids had come home. Besides, that woman just got right back to picking. She wore me down. I couldn’t even look at her when we got back. She was a monster.”

“She convinced you twice to march your own children into the woods and leave them there, but none of this is on you?”

That seemed to be it, the pouring out of his heart was now at an end. I could see in his eyes that I was no longer a victim or circumstance in his eyes, someone that he regretfully needed to get rid of to protect his family. The truth of that last line had hit home, and some men will be able to see wickedness in everything, but in themselves.

He crossed from the far side of the bonfire that he has set up, grabbed the rope where it was tied between my ankles and pulled. My head cracked off of the log that I had been propped against, sending another shock through my still ringing head. When I gathered myself again it was to find him with his boot planted on my chest, pinning me where I was, so that I couldn’t squirm away.

There is the old cliché where in your last moments your life flashes before your eyes. Maybe my brain was too concussed to conjure up those images for me, or maybe that whole thing was nonsense, but in those last moments I thought about those kids. Both of them had been scarred by this ordeal, probably forever. The boy had been turned into a victim. How do you recover your sense of dignity when someone has decided that you are food. The girl was a killer now, not a murderer like her father, but someone who has to live with the knowledge of what it is to take a life. There is a strength in her that gives me some hope that these kids might make it, but they are going to need it. These children were born into a house of horrors, and I can’t convince myself that this will be the last horrific thing that visits them.

I see him as he raises the axe high over his shoulder and I wince away from it as I see it fall. My brain doesn’t have enough time to register pain as the blade of the axe tears through my…

Being the last man on Earth was not all that I would have expected it to be. For one, Earth is way smaller than you probably remember it being. Technically speaking, Earth is still the same size. If you were to spread out an enormous net and drag it through the solar system several million times, picking up every last speck of dust that could be called Earth, it would be roughly the size that you probably have in your head.

For all practical purposes though, the Earth, the biggest chunk of rock that can still reasonably claim the title that the entire planet once held is about thew size of… well, try this, put your arms straight out at your sides, spin around like you are doing that whole “the hills are alive with the sound of music” thing. It’s about big enough to do that, and only feel slightly nervous about falling off the edge.

Don’t ask me how I know that.

It’s not a lot of space, but it’s home. That last bit needs sarcasm font, you probably don’t know me well enough to get the sarcasm there. Yes, this is one of those stories where it is not entirely clear who the first-person narrator would even be talking to. You are dead. Everybody’s dead. On the bright side, you have either been dead for a very long time, or you are likely one of the lucky few who were instantly incinerated when the world ended.

Again, most of the world. All but this little bit.

You would be amazed by the view that you are afforded when you are floating through space on a little chunk of rock while inexplicably not dying from radiation or the lack of atmosphere. You would seriously not get over it.

Okay, I briefly got over it, but then I leaned over the edge of my ceaselessly falling piece of rubble and I got to check out the view on the other side. That’s it, just rotate to the opposite side of the rock every couple days, weeks, hours, I dunno, time is not one of my strong suits at the moment, but anyway, climb over to the other side of this remnant of planet-hood every now and again, and you will be in near continual awe.

It’s not all awe-inspiring views, though.

Actually, If I’m being entirely frank, it is mostly awe-inspiring views. If the views inspired anything less than their current levels of awe than I might start noticing the complete lack of literally anything else.

No food.

No water.

No companionship.

Not anymore.

There is very little in the way of things to do. I find myself sketching in the dust, pacing back and forth, doing that thing that I requested you not to ask me about earlier. Mostly it’s just thinking. Sometimes thinking in the form of talking to myself. Something like this:

“Can you believe that the world ended?” I would say.

“I mean, kind of, all available evidence points that way. Besides, didn’t it really end a long time ago.” I would respond.

“Are we really going to get into that again?” I would ask, clearly annoyed at myself.

“It’s not as though we ever lived on a world that hadn’t ended.” I would shoot back, that little shit.

“The world ended long before we were born. By the time we came around the oceans weren’t even boiling anymore. From our perspective, the world was that deserted wasteland that our ancestors handed down to us.” I would volunteer.

A good point really, but here I am taking sides.

It was a good point, though. What is the end of the world to a generation of people who lived in the world left behind by the most recent apocalypse?

By all rights, none of us should have been able to survive on that not quite ended Earth, and not only did we survive, we… well, no… we never thrived, not even particularly close, we actually really did just survive. Nothing more, and often quite a bit less. It almost certainly would have been a kinder fate for the Earth to have properly ended before I was born, rather than the half-assed ending that my great great whatever not so great grandparents ushered us all into.

The day that big fucking chunk of rock, like considerably larger than this one, smacked into that discarded gym sock of a planet that we called home was a mercy killing. The end of something that should have strongly considered ending itself.

That leaves me here, as I’ve said, floating on a particularly barren rock in a very lovely portion of the galaxy, if I do say so myself.

It turns out that one of the only redeeming aspects of being birthed onto a mostly dead planet is that being constantly on the verge of starving to death most of your life is probably the perfect training for spending your last days floating through space on a glorified boulder. There’s not much to subsist on, nothing actually, but that had always been the case.

So, now that we’ve kind of settled into things, I have a confession to make. I may not have come by my title of last man on Earth by the most honorable of means. There was this other guy. There was this other guy named Tom.

Tom was a dick.

Granted when two people are sharing a few square feet of rock it is pretty hard not to be a dick, but trust me, this wasn’t a situational thing, Tom was just like that. Have you ever known someone who just had a pathological need to be the center of attention? That was Tom. If Tom wasn’t regaling you with every last stray thought that passed through his brain, he was speaking authoritatively on the more well-established domesticated thoughts that had long ago taken up residence in that same brain.

One of the more favored domesticated thoughts, the kind of thought that greeted you at the door and had learned that pissing on the floor was a bad idea, was Tom’s concern that I know that this whole thing was my fault. If I had been a better person, none of this would have happened. If it weren’t for Tom, we wouldn’t even have our sacred few square feet. Tom, far from being the dick that I saw him as, was in fact the holiest man on Earth. Even with the talent pool as reduced as it was, that seemed like a pretty presumptuous thing for him to say, and say it he did.

Frequently.

Anyway, this wasn’t a one-off thing, Tom would go on for days, weeks, minutes about how he thought that this was all God’s wrath on the wicked, like me, not taking into account that God had already gotten all of that out of his system a long time ago, of course. If killing billions of people with fire, disease, and all that other stuff wasn’t the end game, this kind of seemed anticlimactic. But could Tom shut up about it? No, Tom could not. Tom was a dick. You might have heard.

There was this really big book that I heard about one time, Tom was a fan, and there was a story right at the beginning of it, where there were two of the very first people who ever existed, and one of them picked up a big rock and bludgeoned the other one to death.

Heck of a start to the whole human being thing.

Like, you look around and humanity isn’t really a thing yet, but before it has even been meaningfully established, you already have a guy who is pretty sure that there is at least one too many people.

I guess what I’m saying is… I killed Tom.

It seemed like a fitting bookend with that other story.

Floating along in the infinite abyss of space is lonely, but it is greatly improved by the absence of Tom.

I can stretch out a bit.

The vibe is really more peaceful than lonely.

This did have one small but unfortunate side-effect. When I chucked Tom off our rock, we were still falling at a fairly consistent speed, and in roughly the same direction, so if you look right there, yeah there, over my right shoulder, that blobby thing out there, that’s Tom. He’s kind of just hanging around, blessedly silent, but still mocking me.

The sky has gotten a little bit smaller, at least for a while, he’ll eventually be gone.

There was this other book, it was a much smaller book, and it didn’t sell nearly as many copies as the big book, but it was about a much bigger book that was pretty much the best-selling book ever, and it had these two guys who were stranded in the vacuum of space and were miraculously saved by a magic spaceship.

Neither one of those guys was a very good guy, and they somehow managed to not kill each other. Not that I’m feeling judged or anything.

I sometimes dream of being rescued by a magic spaceship.

Neither one of those guys was as big a dick as Tom.

Speaking of books, it’s kind of a miracle that while ninety-nine percent of all life on Earth died during that first apocalypse, we still managed to retain a surprisingly large number of libraries. There are no libraries now, not even cute little boxes on poles with free books in them that were never real libraries at all. I could go for a library right now, even a little fake library on a pole.

One of the annoying things about Tom was that he never really saw any need for libraries. He was super into that big book that I was talking about earlier and would occasionally read other books that were about that big book but he didn’t have anything but vitriol for other books. He didn’t seem to like stories, which is really weird to me.

I really did not get Tom.

There was another little book, actually even littler than the last one I was talking about. It was about a kid who lived on a rock kind of like mine or maybe more like that one that killed the Earth, he didn’t have a Tom, but what he did have was a plant. The plant actually was kind of a dick, but the kid loved it. I’m not sure that I get this kid either. One day, some space birds came by and flew him to another planet. I could really go for some space birds.

The book was mostly about how silly adults are, and as an adult as well as a person who was raised as a child on a planet decimated by silly adults, it’s hard not to agree with it.

Tom was a very silly adult.

Tom was always very very concerned about the blood-thirsty mutants that lived on the hill. It turned out that before we ended up together on this rock, that Tom had the strong opinion that all of life’s problems really came down to the blood thirsty mutants on the hill.

I never really got where he was coming from with that one. Were there mutants on the hill? Yes, but you could hardly blame someone for being a mutant when you live in an irradiated wasteland.

An irradiated wasteland with libraries, but still.

I’m actually surprised we didn’t have more mutants, on the hill or otherwise. As far as the blood-thirsty thing goes, everyone was thirsty, it was one of the main defining characteristics of living things by that point. I don’t know if the thirst thing had anything to do with blood, but I tend to think that they were just regular thirsty, and even if they weren’t, can you really blame them?

Tom was big on making people into scapegoats. I’m not exactly sure what goats are, they seemed to be some kind of horned animal, but in that big book of his there was this thing where you would take all of the bad things and make it a goat’s fault. That seems like a reasonable idea, much better than going around calling people blood-thirsty mutants.

Far from being satisfied with being openly anti-blood-thirsty mutant himself, Tom was the kind of guy who needed to rile everyone else up to hate their supposedly blood-thirsty mutant neighbors as well.

No food? It was the blood-thirsty mutants at fault.

Everyone breaks out into fresh radiation pustules? You guessed it, blood-thirsty mutants.

The point is this, for some people it doesn’t matter how bad something is, they are only capable of making it worse because it doesn’t matter how bad things actually are. What really matters is that things are slightly better for them than they are for other people. Tom may have been a miserable son of a bitch, but if he could make things measurably worse for some outsiders, then that meant that he was winning.

Winning at what?

Who the hell knows.

Who’s winning now, slowly drifting into the nothingness of space, blob-Tom?

If anyone is winning, it’s me, and I am very much not winning.

I’m the last one to leave, and there aren’t even any lights to turn out. The lights I have now are beyond my ability to turn out anyway or they’ve already gone out and just haven’t let me know about it yet.

It’s strange to stare at the vast array of stars laid out before and think that I could be staring at a graveyard, and I would never know about it.

There were books in the libraries, both fiction and non-fiction, that pictured us traveling among these stars. We apparently got out here at one point or another, but we never got much further than I am now. Didn’t meet any of our neighbors. Didn’t set foot on another planet. People didn’t take camping trips to the moon or anything neat like that, but we got out here which is still pretty cool.

It makes you wonder what we could have done with ourselves if we had leaned more into that sort of thing and less of the destroying the world, drag everyone down and give in to our worst impulses Tom type stuff. We might still have ended up where I am today, it’s still pretty hard to dodge a giant space rock that resulted in the world exploding, but maybe we would have come up with something, some big space shield or at least an evacuation plan or something.

I don’t know, I guess I just feel like we could have done better. Been more than our worst urges. I say this as someone who has very recently murdered someone, so the moral high ground avoids me every bit as much as the physical high ground, or most any ground at all. Reflection would seem to be a side-effect of going from a human being to the sum total of humanity.

If I were to get scooped up by a magic alien spaceship or flown to a new world by a flock of space birds, what would they think of the human race when I told them about it. Yes, we were clearly a bunch of idiots who destroyed ourselves long before an asteroid or whatever came along and finished us off. Telling them that part would be embarrassing, but we weren’t all bad.

Spending my life having little to do but read and starve I’ve heard from plenty of the voices that were calling us to be better. That big book that justified Tom being so angry all of the time even had more than a few scraps of that. We just refused to listen to those voices, or enough of us did that it ultimately didn’t make a difference.

What would be the legacy of the human race, you know, if there was any reason to believe that the human race would have any legacy at all? As I sit on this crumbling remnant of my planet, I would like to think that something beautiful would find its way into the hands or tentacles or whatever of a species that we never met. I wish that culture would get entirely the wrong idea about us. That maybe something excellent had been tragically wiped out when we were destroyed. That the universe would have been a better place with us in it someday. That we could have been friends. That something in us might have even inspired them to do better.

There will be no legacy for the human race, and maybe that was the kindest end that we could have hoped for. No one whooping and cheering at our demise because we never truly left a mark in the cosmos at all. We could be forgotten, and no one would ever need to know what we were.

Thinking of all the people who did unspeakable things in their lives for personal gain, but also for the possibility that we would remember them when they are gone, and how there will soon be no people to speak about them at all. There’s already no one left to listen.

So, here I sit, the repository of all things human. I know everything there is to know about the human race and its history because anything that I don’t know, that I never learned or have managed to forget, might as well have never happened.

As this shard of the planet is the last little piece of Earth, so am I. Maybe as I drift here, waiting to die, I can give humanity an opportunity to pass away with dignity.

Tom, as much as you don’t deserve it, I’m sorry.

I don’t think that you were doing your best with the information that was available to you, but I didn’t do any better in the end. I gave in to the impulse that much better people than me had repressed all throughout history because they thought that being the actual better person would do more good than getting rid of the bad ones.

There is no “greater good” to serve anymore, but I still dishonored the memory, or even lack of memory, of all those people, those people that I wish that we could have been known for if there was anyone else out there to know us.

I’m sorry, but yes, probably more to them than you, Tom.

The ground below me is starting to give way, and it turns out that dehydration, starvation, and madness aren’t going to have the notoriety of ending me. With the ground goes the inexplicable bubble of air that was sustaining me and I’m floating alone, no longer tethered to Earth, no longer sustained by it.

Only moments left.

My last thoughts.

A flock of space birds.

A magic spaceship.

Huh.

What were the chances of that?

“Wolf! Wolf!”

The shout rang through the valley, carrying into the village.

I was the first to arrive on the scene, though the men from town would not be far behind.

I found the boy there, a grin spread across his face, clearly pleased with his performance. With some effort he banished the glee from his expression, putting on the guise of the frightened child. A story spilled forth from his mouth, claims of a wolf almost impossibly large.

It had run off, of course, disappearing into the nearby woods.

“Isn’t it obvious,” I guffawed to the assembled crowd, “this bored child is just having some fun with us.”

“Don’t be a fool, boy.” I shift my gave in his direction, softening somewhat, “I know there isn’t much to do to occupy yourself, sitting among the sheep, but don’t claim that there is a wolf when there is none. No one likes a liar.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but the fun has apparently gone out of the game, and he lowers his head and returns to the sheep.

The crowd dispersed, the promise of danger having turned to something that masked itself in relief but was really disappointment. Everyone returning to their homes, and the business of the evening, in some ways as bored and lonely as the boy with the sheep.

Not unlike the rest of the village, I picked up my night’s plans where I had left off with them. A stunning evening, the moon hanging bright and full in the sky, lending a quality of mischief and drama to the proceedings.

The cry came again, “Wolf! Wolf!” a panic ridden shriek splitting the silence of the summer night.

I was once again the first to reach the boy, practically rolling on the ground in laughter.

The townspeople once again crested the hill, prepared to defend this young boy who was so set on toying with them for his own amusement.

By the time that they were in sight of the scene, the boy had gotten his mirth under control and had settled his form back into the character of the distressed shepherd. Despite the falseness of the previous alarm, they arrived more confused than angry to find the boy alone and the sheep undisturbed.

The wolf, of course, had once again escaped into the woods when he heard the boy’s scream, but apparently unsatisfied with the enormous wolf of his original tale, the wolf in this new iteration of the story had been embellished until it had become a creature who walked upright like a man.

“Are you all really as gullible as this child has made you out to be?” I implored the crowd.

“Not only are we to believe in this wolf who conveniently runs off every time that we come near, but now he wants us to believe in some sort of wolf-man. Boy, keep your tall tales to yourself, the rest of us have better things to do.”

Once again the crowd parted, grumbling with not a few muttered curses and angry stares in the direction of the boy. The child, for his own part, would not let the act drop, pleading with them to stay as if his preposterous stories hadn’t been works of obvious fiction.

In their wake, I removed myself from the scene once again, eager to return to the true focus of my evening.

“Wolf!” Not a cry or a shout this time, but a throat shredding scream.

I came into his presence one last time, finding him a whimpering crying mess, shaking with fear. The night had gone quiet, the normal quiet complaints of the sheep replaced with a vacancy of sound that made the remaining sniffles and squeaks of the sobbing boy all the more… satisfying.

The smell of blood seeping into the soil fills my snout, more sensitive now that I can fully turn myself over to my true nature. Changing that many times in a single evening was hungry work, and painful, but there is always pain in the change. It was nothing to me, or at least nothing in comparison to that about to be felt by the boy who cried wolf.

I had done it.

Many had tried it before, but I had actually done it.

You would think that the hard part would be achieving staggering wealth, but the real work as always comes down to the details. Anyone can become a billionaire, well not anyone if we are concerned about how far we’re stretching credulity, but the point being that it at least seems like an achievable goal. Frankly, it’s one of the little fictions that allow any of them to exist in the first place. Having a trillion dollars seems to be at least conceptually possible, but when you start talking about having all of the money in the world you begin to run into some pretty tough logistical issues.

Do you know how many pennies, or penny equivalents, there are in the world?

How about nickels? Damn, I hate nickels.

If you want to have ALL of the money in the world, you are talking about mason jars of change. Dimes that have found their way into an old coffee can full of nuts and bolts. You are talking about people who have tacky little cardboard displays of all fifty state quarters. You have to consider scouring the ocean floor for sunken pirate treasure, and gold coins sitting behind glass in museums. Dragging the bottom of wishing wells, digging between the cushions of every coach on the planet.

Do you actually know how many different types of currency there are in the world?

At least I don’t have to worry about crypto, that stuff is clearly fake.

The whole thing is an enormous undertaking, but do you know what clears up most of those complications? That’s right, money. It’s also made significantly easier when you realize that once you have taken control of most of the larger chunks of cash that you are essentially paying yourself for everything that you buy.

Ironically, for the last decade, the largest economic driver in the world was actually my own search to complete my collection of the world’s currency. Fully one quarter of the entire population of the planet was employed by me in this task in one way of another. From people walking the sides of roads and parking lots scrounging for change and others scouring the globe with metal detectors to deep sea divers on the ocean’s floor.

Like many of the world’s richest men prior to me, peasants by comparison of course, I am not satisfied merely with the accumulation of wealth. I am an adventurer at heart and have been employing some of the greatest scientists and engineers in the world in the construction of the largest, most luxurious spacecraft ever constructed. I am going to explore the galaxy and deliver the stars to our planet in a way that it’s governments have never had the will to do.

I will also be taking every last scrap of my money with me.

I’m not foolish enough to think that I can trust the rest of you not to spread it around again while I’m not looking.

Today was the day. I broke atmosphere a few hours ago in the fastest, most advanced piece of technology that humanity has ever conceived of. My course has been plotted and laid in by my crew, and I am off to places that no human being has ever seen before. All I have to do is kick back and wait.

The view screen shows me the Earth disappearing behind me, transformed by distance into a shimmering blue dot, and with the Earth behind me I can only look forward.

The glowing disc of the sun starts to burn on the screen.

It is growing larger.

And larger.

Filling the view screen.

Nothing but a roiling angry sheet of fire.

Oh shit.