the end

LAME

 

The boy was engaging in an old routine that had quite lost its charm. He had dressed for it, but not as much as he would have had these been under normal circumstances.

 Normal he thought. How thin was line between normal and abnormal… how loosely they could be interchanged. It’s all relative…

He was dressed in running shorts, and his fathers fancy hi-tech exercise shirts. The clothing had been long stored away, and still held the old scent of his father.

Donning it brought tears to his eyes.

On the way out he grabbed his little brother’s favorite hat from his room, and stuffed it into his pocket. He walked into his parents’ room and took a picture from one of the frames. He gazed into it, eyes becoming hazy in memory and sadness. He put on his sneakers and left.

The run had been a ritualistic thing before. He had often run with different family members, and when he ran alone, this was his route. He ran.

The first two miles were uphill and brought him into the woods.

As the sun set, a darkness came to the New England landscape, and the barely pre-winter cool became more of a cold… the exercise kept him warm.

He ran uphill, over the now abandoned road that had long since been used by the cars and motored vehicles. Unfortunately these things no longer had the power needed to run them, and they now remained in yards or on the road itself, as symbols of what had been.

He ran uphill. The trees were dying all but the evergreens that would never die, defying the world’s ways, offending the boy. The other trees however, those bare, naked, and dying, only reminded him of his own situation… the situation of the world.

The higher he traveled, the closer he got to the sun’s ever diminishing shine, until he finally took a sharp left onto a road of dirt and rocks. He stopped and walked, now winded and breathing heavily, yet invigorated. This was the first time he’d been out since he had to bury his parents; almost a year ago. He had tended to his brother then, fighting a losing battle against and enemy that would take almost everybody on earth but him and maybe others for some reason. The question of his invincibility to the disease still haunted him as did the memory of the burial of his family members. He would have much rather had perished first instead of living when all others were dead.

He began to run again, brother’s hat in one hand, his father’s clothes on his back, and a picture in the other hand.

He ran downhill.

Parallel to the woods he ran, the only constant sound being his breath, and the steady beating of his heart clashing with the semi-consistent beat if his foot against gravel and dirt.

Occasionally he heard the sound of an animal scurrying away from either side as he ran. Once it sounded as if something were keeping in steady gate with him from the woods.

He ran faster.

He could not keep this up. The years of hard living had gotten to him. His malnutrition was beginning to slow him down… yet he kept on. He had deciding to do. 

So, the boy, not quite man, slowed his pace, taking in the scenery.

To his left, through the trees, he could see the other side of the mini valley he now traversed. He even spotted where his friend had once lived… where he was now, indubitably, buried, with his family. Or maybe he lay were death had left him; in the grace of being the last of the family to die.

The boy could see his friend’s face. It hurt him so to see such a familiar, and loved face in the agony and throws of death by disease. The boy could see his friend, sprawled in a chair, head back, eyes open, dead.

This image brought more dead tears to his tired eyes. He forced himself on, sniffing, and making himself look somewhere else. Where else to look? Everywhere was the same. To his left he would come across the few residences on the deserted road. Every house he past could only hold the same. Some buried one or two just laying where death had left them; more than likely, whole families died where they fell, being too weak to bury each other. The dead can not bury the dead.

The boy kept on, thinking, remembering, and wishing he couldn’t.

Whishing he was dead.

He remembered the day his brother was born, all of the family parties and reunions, all of the friends he had ever known, all the girls he had never dared talk to. A new thought came. He had never, and never would experience love. Yes he had of course experienced the love one feels for family, and friends, but never the love that only tow people can share, nothing… intimate… only longing…

Yet another blow was dealt, and he continued.

Finally, the dirt road spat him back out onto the main road. To his left the paved road winded up-hill for many more miles before peaking, and dropping downward into yet another ghost town full of memories and relics of a time come to past, which would lead him to yet another, and another…

For once the world agreed, and was the same, was equal.

The world was the same in death… the world was equal in death…

The world agreed only, in death.

To his left the road led the boy downhill, into the town, past the houses of dead neighbors and friends, to his house, to his yard, to the graves.

His decision was tougher than he thought.

Should he go, and live as long as he could, in hopes of living till age, or another disease met up with him?

Should he go forth, and seek the globe for others like him? No, this was impossible, how could he without real transportation. Besides, perhaps he was now the sole survivor, the last homo sapien on earth. This thought brought the pressure of the achievements and failures of man crashing down on his shoulders. No, he could not take such pressure.

Finish off what the disease had not? He didn’t have the guts... did he?

The boy looked at the photo, held his brother’s hat, felt his father’s clothes…

The only thing left at his home was a house, and corpses… no family members remained.

His decision was made. He ran right, up-hill again, and for the last time.   

 

The boy ran. How many miles he traveled he cared not to know, but it was surely far, too far for him in his deprived condition. But, he fought on, and traveled up the middle of the twisted road. At times he saw phantom headlights from cars and other vehicles rushing toward him. He would run faster, as to meet these sweet instruments of death more quickly, as to end his suffering… only to find that nothing lay before him, and that he had yet to wait for death.

As he ran he drifted in and out of consciousness, at times waking to find himself about to run into an old guard-rail, or rock face. During his unconscious states he found the friends and family of a life now over. He was with his entire family, extended members and all. In this sweet dream he was also greeted with the phantom ghost of the love that had never been. He believed he had found his true love, only in death.

He didn’t believe in love at first sight, but was sure that it happened all the time.

While awake he felt the pain of his exertions throughout his body. His legs and lungs ached, and his stomach screamed from a lack of food, and water. His hands were numb and in a locked claw like grip around his brother’s hat and the picture, from the autumn cold, and the lack of movement.

He froze. He burned, and he ran, and crawled and trudged on.

His other nightmarish delusions were filled with the ghouls that he had never before encountered, yet had waited in the depths of his mind. They crawled and slithered and lurched all about him, striking him, biting him, whipping him, cutting him open. Every time he was to die, he awoke to find himself standing head down, in the middle of the dark deserted land. He continued. The boogy-men were now inviting to him.

 

The autumn sun shone down on the black top, warming it gradually. It would be a beautiful day, unusually warm for the first of November.

A crow lit upon a tree, shaking the one or two remaining leaves from the skeletal thing. Before it, a legacy lay, dying.

A human lay on its back, breathing in his last few shallow breathes. The long cold night, the lack of sufficient food or water, exhaustion, heartbreak… these things killed him.

The crow sensed something about this. Animals died everyday, but this was special. This was a human dying, perhaps the last. The reign of man was seconds form the end.

The crow flew down tentitively, landing on the dead boy’s chest. Beneath its feet was a sudden unexpected bump of a heart, though weak. The crow hovered above the boy for a moment, and landed again on his chest, remained, ridding the quickly ebbing tide of the boy’s heart beat, and breathing until, all was still.

The crow cocked its head and gazed into the closed eyes of the boy. The short time of men had ended. It was the return of the old regime, and the end of the new.

The crow stared for a while longer, and then flew away from the road at the top of the mountain. He would find food, and leave this body, with its father’s clothes, brother’s hat, and picture clasped in a tight grip of death in its right hand… a picture of a smiling mother, grinning father, and two happy brothers from a world dead so recently, yet seemingly so long ago.

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[The earth (Titan maphah..]

this is so beautiful... keep on writing I beg you