It’s the End, Isn’t It?

By Hannah MacKey

You think about the time your fingertips turned blue after standing in the cold waiting for them. It was September, but winter approached faster than anyone had expected. You were nervous because this was your first anything. You were hoping for first love. Everyone hopes for first love even if they don’t really think it; their subconscious holds onto it tightly as if they're afraid to let go. Then they opened the door, and your first thought was, am I overdressed or are they underdressed? Hair unkempt, shoes untied, but you didn’t think anything of it. And you still had a good time, even after the waiter got your order wrong and you accidentally tripped into a puddle while walking with them. You lied—you told them you were clumsy, but you had never tripped over yourself before. That was the moment you started questioning love. If focusing on their words, dry lips, and soft, doe eyes had been your undoing. 

Your fingertips are blue again but this time it’s January, and the heat in your house has gone out, most likely for good. Even though the radio still works, the news is barren of any light at the end of this, and their last broadcast was grim. The government can’t send out any more aid packages to survivors, which included cans of food, small heating appliances, and a pitiful first-aid kit—but you needed it, and they needed it, and now it’s all coming to an anticlimactic end. The stores are raided, roads riddled with abandoned cars and broken bodies, and ash swarms the sky like love, an overwhelming, reminiscing love. It’s far too difficult and dangerous to scavenge through the thick clouds and call for help, so you turn to the melodic sound of your kitchen faucet dripping like an IV bag. A reminder that your pipes haven’t frozen yet. That you haven’t died yet. 

They’re upstairs reading a book you got them two Christmases ago. Instead of Christmas dinner or dessert, you had celebrated with a stale cupcake you bought out of spite, made by the bakery they hated, and they ended up eating the whole thing. They didn’t want you to know that they enjoyed the cupcake, and you both didn’t know that this would be your last breath of normal before those gray, suffocating clouds filled the sky with repugnance—or maybe that’s too poetic. It was time for a catalyst to tear the world apart. Cinematically, poetically, literally. Suffocating isn’t cinematic, not in the way television portrays it. They don’t emphasize how long it takes to disintegrate human spirit and will into dust. It might be poetic though, in the bittersweet way poetry is laced with foggy resolutions and forlorn experiences we’re too scared to muster. The ground covered in clouds of grayish-white, the cracked earth erupting into the sky, it all has to be poetic in some way. Are these attempts at living just to make sense of it all even worthwhile? These thoughts have been weighing on your mind. You want to tell them how you’ve been feeling. How you’re torn between wanting to live and the chore of living, but you got into an argument last time you expressed this. 

“Does it even matter? Does it even fucking matter?” they said, exasperated, but you knew they didn’t mean it. Despite this, you could barely contain the hot tears staining your cheeks. Now every breath counts, so you rarely fight unless you and they are willing to endure the ragged, torn words stinging at your throats with every hurled sentence. You take a breath, a gulp of air that singes your lungs like a cast-iron skillet, and sigh. You’re tired of preserving your battered inhales. After all this, when the ash finally dissipates from the sky leaving a scorched aftermath, you could blame them. You wanted to move somewhere “more east,” but they didn’t listen. They were close with their family, unlike you, and wanted to build from the foundation you both created. Bullshit, you think. It wasn’t cultivated from the both of you, it was them and their parents’ money and a nice house in a neighborhood where the houses breathe the same air. Despite this, there’s no use getting mad anymore. You don’t have the energy to. 

There are several oil lamps scattered about the house, your sources of light and comfort. They offer a temporary feeling of warmth, but it would take all of them gathered together to keep you and them comfortable. That would be a fire hazard, and you aren’t sure if you aren’t as clumsy as you once were. You grab more blankets and comforters from a closet, a can of tuna from the pantry, and a dirty fork from the sink, hoping they’ll be awake enough to eat dinner. With timid steps, you ascend stairs that whisper and turn to the first door in the hallway. They’re curled up on thin mattresses, chest utterly still. The room is blanketed in a thin sheet of tension and ice. You hesitate, linger in the doorway for a moment too long, and they shift their position onto their back. The oil lamp shoved into the corner of the room emanates an amber glow.  

At first, you position yourself at the edge of the bed, blankets coiled in your arms like serpents, tuna slipping out of your hand. During a night like this, where the quiet overtakes the wind and crickets in a soft hum, the stars would be burning suns splattered across the sky. The clouds and sprinkles of ash drown out everything now. They accompany the hums and whirs of quiet that remind you that you’re still here. You finally begin to take the blankets you have and layer them one by one over top of them, careful to not cover their face as they rest. After the sediment of blankets, sheets, and comforters has settled, you find yourself lying beside them. Although you both have on coats to combat the unforgiving weather, you’re weak. The cold causes discomfort in your creaky limbs. If it were pre-apocalypse, you would make a joke about how old you feel, how you feel like a senior citizen. You turn to them to see if anything will make them move. Perhaps nothing at all. Suddenly, fear grips you, and you run a shaky hand across their chest. You can’t be left alone in this, not like this, they can’t leave you like this. Your eyes wire shut as you steady your breathing, and it’s there, a slow heartbeat dragging itself towards the inevitable. You breathe a sigh of relief. 

You wrap yourself under the blankets, forcing your body as close as possible to theirs, and finally, they grunt as they move away from you. It’s better than nothing. You look past their cocooned body and over at the flickering light. It dances to a tune you can’t understand, and maybe it’s not worth understanding, but it’s enough to help you sleep. You sandwich the can of tuna in between your bodies. Eventually, you’ll be jarred from exhaustion, and eventually, you’ll wake them up and hand them the tuna. Even if this isn’t the relationship you wanted at the end of tragedy, if this isn’t the person you once loved, it's all you have now. 

And there’s no swelling music, no gasps, no faint whispers. No moment of held breaths released into silence, followed by hesitant applause. It’s just you, and them, and the wrinkled sheets between you.