The End

Let the sun shine and the moon fall.

The last time I ever saw my Dad alive he was pissing in the toilet, smoking a cigar and wearing an orange wig. He was absolutely, entirely drunk. He moaned as he pissed, audible throughout the entire Victorian beach house. I walked down the hallway, passing the open bathroom door and looked in. He was looking at me with that facetious grin. Then he laughed, and the laughs combined with the pissing and the wig was too much for my drunk state to comprehend, so I walked outside onto the beach and looked at the remnants of the party. I'm not going to say goodnight. There's no need. The fire pit was lazily burning a couple of beached logs, and the ocean regurgitated itself onto damp darkness of the beach. The moon glowed frigidly; I heard Dad move around in the house, the sound of the toilet swallowing his piss. He was probably cording himself now.

I picked up some neglected plastic red cups off the ground and threw them in the trash, all the while thinking about my friends. They get to leave this place, and they will never come back. I will never see them again, and I will be left behind and forgotten. Mars is thirty five million miles from Earth. From the beach. From me. They left my life as soon as the drinks stopped flowing; left onto the boat that sped them off to the launch site. 

I sat down in the cool sand and lit a cigarette. The sirens broke through the sound of the crashing waves and I stood up because I knew that in ten seconds they would be gone, launched out of here forever. The siren buzzed twice, and I dropped the smoke and fell to my knees. The siren was a ticking timer, about to explode any second, the clock in my mind will be blown to nothing as well. The siren has buzzed seven times and I start to scream in disheartening hopelessness. 

The sirens have been choked out, and for a long second it was only the waves, only the wind of the ocean, and then I winced at the fire from the rocket and instantly felt overwhelming heat, scolding one hundred and twenty five degrees, even from seven miles away I still feel the burning air. 

The rockets eye blinks at me in the dark sky, and all at once it was no longer there; in five seconds it has already traveled five thousand miles into the void of space. Where there was no time, where all that ever remained was a lapse. A never ending road. In six months all of my friends, all of my companions, my lovers and my muses, they will be landing on that Red ball. The desert will be their oasis. 

There was a smell of excreted gas, burnt, and now dissolving in the oxygen. The waves continued to flow. I heard Dad yell from inside the house. There was a thick sound, like something heavy being dropped. It didn't register; I just watched the last people on Earth leave. I picked up the rest of the trash off the beach and then realized the wind from the rocket had blown over the trashcans; the trash scattered allover the beach. I gave up and went inside.

I called for Dad but he didn't respond. He was probably sprawled out on his bed in drunken, saturnine sleep. Dreaming about the faces of our Community. About Lizbeth Abbey. About Lizbeth Abbeys legs and her supply of dopamine extract and all those happy syringes all about her room. Never to return. 

I knocked on his door, trying to be audible enough if he was awake but not too loud if he was asleep.  There was a stirring, a sudden movement, and I tried the door. It opened gently and I didn't even have to look because the smell of his expired conscience lingered in the air. I looked anyway.  He was hanging from the ceiling fan. A thick rope dangled him and his feet  swayed left and right and left and right. His eyes were open but they didn't glow. The scanners noted his death. I left the room.

In the bathroom I looked at myself for a long while. I looked in my eyes. The scanners picked up traces of a bacterial virus (Lizbeth Abbey) around the corners of my mouth and I wiped it away. The scanners in my eyes looked into themselves in the mirror, and I felt them vibrate in the soft gelatin behind my glowing iris. If you look at them too long, you start to know that they exist. 

I looked away from the mirror after I started getting dizzy. I rubbed my eyes and stared at the toilet. The scanners picked up trails of urine allover the toilet, on the ground and the tub. My fathers name formed in the corner of my sight, and below that " urine content: Vodka: 23 oz, Whiskey: 14 oz, Gin: 33 oz. There was also semen in the tub, along with other genital discharge. The scanners depicted my fathers name and Lizbeth Abbey. Well, at least he had his time with her.

I grabbed a beer and walked back out onto the beach and waited for the last sun. I fell down in the sand with a blood alcohol content of 0.36. The scanners noted a sudden increase in my heart rate. It was probably the dopamine extract from early. Oh, Lizbeth.

In my left eye the time was stated, 2:33 am, but the sun was beginning to rise.

The scanners caught a soaring bird in the pinking clouds and I couldn’t let go of its sight. It was truly beautiful. The scanners blinked as a video message was transferred to my neuroceptors, a message from Lizbeth  Abbey but I ignored it. I finished the beer and closed my eyes and was about to fall asleep when my scanners initialized a final message from Lizbeth. It was right there in the void of my closed eyes, glowing text floating on the thin screen on my scapula. I couldn't ignore it. Goodbye, Rick.

When I woke the sun was bright, the moon was floating like a black eye in front of it. The solar eclipse commenced to the destruction of the moon. I woke at the perfect time. The waves receded suddenly, the entire ocean was swallowed by itself. The sun grew bigger and the scanners noted a temperature of 127 °F and it went up a degree every couple seconds. The scanners said I slept only for forty minutes.

I stood up and started towards the dried ocean. The scanners reported a temperature of  148 °F and then I felt a painful vibration in my eyes. The scanners gave out, popping in my eyes, and I fell to my knees screaming in absolute pain and sheer terror. My sight disappeared. There was nothing I could do about it. I felt my skin start to shrivel, but there was nothing I could do. It felt like the breath of the rocket multiplied by a hundred. With the scanners in my eyes melted, I could finally think clearly. Real images formed in my mind for a second, just one second, and then they were gone and the pain took over. I wish I could see what was happening. The only image that is left burnt into my head is the message from Lizbeth. Goodbye. I screamed out the last moment of my life as the Lunar meteorites rained upon the surface of the boiling Earth.

Reviews

[Naraly Godinez]

Unlike any other story you've written. It had a great plot, and the climax had been building up and somehow being unnoticed. I was confused with the scanners at first but then they became an interesting " character" in the story. They almost took the role of our suppressed senses. And even then they were like the power house of all the conclusions we come to. It was as if the story was an entire ultimatum of choices

[roxy.puppies]

That was an excellent story!, It was heartbreaking indeed but once the father died I couldn't stop reading!
Some tips: You should make the story more clear, I had no idea what was going on with this whole Lizbeth business, otherwise, couldn't spot any other flaws!
Well done, Chadvonswan!

[Chadvonswan]

Thank you very much for commenting and thanks for reading!!

[ZackOfBridge]

Quite the tale of destruction, both self-destruction and natural destruction. Perfect amount of detail and mystery wrapped into an apocalyptic sci-fi story