ONE AND ONE MAKES TWO

Is it war, or might it be love?

Then there were two.

Just the two of us left on the whole of planet Earth because wasn’t that just a heart-stopping explosion tearing through everything? Hadn’t the war to definitely end all wars definitely begun?

“I love you,” she said, and I would like to have honestly replied with an I love you of my own, but at that precise moment I didn’t love her even though I’d just made love to her, nor did I even love myself.

How could any man love a woman or anyone else when the bombs were saying we had reached the ending of days?

“You’d better come this way,” grunted the ogre who had slid into the room past an almost-closed bedroom door when Amy wasn’t looking.

Then I used the girl in my arms as an excuse, and I tell you now, I’m not proud of myself for doing it.

“I’m with Amy,” I said.

“My name’s Amalie,” she protested.

“Shut up,” I growled.

“Now,” grinned the ogre, “And don’t try my patience,” it added with a sudden scowl.

“If there’s a war raging and bombs are falling then you’ve got to bear the brunt of them!”

“Me?” I questioned, almost scared, “Why me?”

“You’re a man and it’s men who are smashing this nice green world into smithereens even as I waste any time you’ve got left trying to make you see sense.”

“What are you jabbering about?” asked Amy or Amalie or whatever her name is.

“Leave this to me,” I insisted, and climbed out of bed.

Do you know what an ogre looks like? No? Well I do. It looks as if it’s ancient rock made into flesh, and I’m pretty sure it stinks as well, of vileness, putrefaction and stuff like that. And it was a male, I could tell that by the way that it’s obviously masculine whatsit was swinging slightly as if being stirred by a breeze from hell or something like that, because he was, of course, stark naked.

“This way!” he commanded me.

There was me, standing there minus my pyjama bottoms and with Amalie staring at me as if I’d gone stark raving mad, which struck me as being highly probable.

“I’ll be right back,” I said to her, trying to sound as if I needed to do something important like going to the toilet.

The ogre started leading the way, his skin with the texture of well worn concrete creaking as he took every step

“Come back, Peter!” commanded Amy/Amalie.

I was torn between two worlds: the passionate one with a lovely woman on the cusp of middle age and the commanding one made of old stone.

The old stone won. It had to.

“This way,” it insisted, and scratched what ought to have been hair on its craggy head, and moulded short back and sides. with a finger that seemed to be little more that a fat spike, creating a cloud of dust that threatened to choke me.

He (I would refer to it as an it rather than a he, but he was clearly male and I’m not one for being ignorant in the middle of a war) led me down the stairs and through the front door and out onto the street where an army of ogres just like him stood waiting. They crowded round him and saluted with grit-encrusted arms raised in a gravelly greeting.

Amalie couldn’t believed her eyes as she saw me walk out of the front door, and it crossed my mind that not only couldn’t she see the gnome I was following but she had no idea that a massive explosion had torn our world apart.

I somehow managed to join the throng of stone ogres and was carried off in a wave of something I couldn’t understand. Was it strength or fear?

We were well past the outskirts of town when I was herded by what seemed a thousand rough and flinty ghoulish arms into a cave that hadn’t been there yesterday as far as I could remember, and I’ve long considered myself to be an expert on the substructure of our planet. It was then that it happened again.

A nuclear device exploded. It can’t have been anything else.

In a moment of sheer insanity the night was torn by a second gigantic explosion that heaved an enormous mushroom of matter high into the sky and above the clouds, and my head was blown clean off my shoulders and sent spinning over the grotesque crowd, all of whom had fallen to their knees once inside the cave that they had entered, and had started whispering something I could barely hear as my head whisked past them.

“What on Earth?” I demanded of my original guide, and he sniggered at me. “It’s the very end,” he said haughtily, “the end of life on Earth, of the Earth itself, and man has done it.”

“But why?” I begged.

“Because some prince or king or self appointed leader who thought his opinions mattered didn’t like the colour of his woman’s knickers,” he replied, dead seriously. “It’s what men do,” he added, “attach vital importance to something as vital as a particular shade of pink or green or blue, and go to war over it…”

“But...but… but I didn’t say goodbye to Amy,” I spluttered.

“Don’t worry your little head about that,” he sniggered, probably because my head was definitely off anyway, “in a few seconds you will both be dust glowing in the vastness of a Universe and blown together until not even a deity could say which grain of dust was you and which was the lovely Amy, and then you’ll be able to say what you like, because it will go unheard and anyway not mean very much…”

“Peter!” shouted Amy or Amalie, though I knew at that moment I only ever thought of her as Amy, “what do you think you’re doing with your bits on display for anyone who happens to be looking to perv at, and it’s raining!”

“I’m sorry….” I managed as my head did an orbit of the moon and zoomed back to me.

“Men!” she scoffed, “the trouble with men is you’ve never got your eyes on what really matters! Now come back to bed! I want to enjoy round two before we get up.”

“You better had,” hissed the ogre, “maybe you can tell her how much you love her and that everything else can wait…”

“Even Christmas?” I grinned, suddenly and for no obvious reason happy as I rarely am, “and the war is over?”

“Just on hold,” he smirked as he melted into the wardrobe door of my bedroom, and for no obvious reason Amy didn’t notice.

But then she wouldn’t, would she? Amy’s a woman and only really understood love.

And then two became one.

© Peter Rogerson 20.12.24