The Curtain Call

Denial (Stage 1)

Alyssa is sweating.

Heart pounding, she clears her throat, smiling thinly at the camera. She pushes her glasses back to the bridge of her nose, clutching her microphone, and she inhales slowly, chewing on the inside of her cheek. 

She has interviewed war-lords. 

She has interviewed war-lords, she has interrogated dictators, and she has travelled hundreds of miles away from her home to speak with the dredges of society. She can handle this. She needs to handle this. 

“It’s a hoax.” Her voice is quiet —  almost a whisper — and she swallows, brushing a thin strand of hair away from her face. “It has to be a hoax.” She laughs hoarsely. “I mean, a meteor? That sounds like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie!” Dimly, she notices that her head is bobbing up and down like an overeager pelican, and she stills, gripping her microphone harder. She glances around the room, eying her colleagues and daring them to contradict her. 

Tracey steps up beside her, and she grimaces. “How can you claim that this announcement is fake when it came from the President’s mouth, and the skies are literally red?” she says skeptically, and Alyssa winces. “How can you ignore the opinions of thousands of experts insisting that this is real, and that we should prepare for global extinction?” Her smile is stiff, and she blinks, baring her teeth.

“You’re one to talk. You’re an anti-vaxxer,” she says, sweet as honey, and Tracey flushes. “The truth is…” she starts, and she pauses. “It’s impossible. It’s- it’s just impossible.” 

“How?” says Tracey, and she sounds almost pleading, now. As if she’s begging to be wrong. 

Alyssa shakes her head, raking her fingers through her matted hair. She-

Doesn’t know. 

(It’s impossible because her daughter is watching this broadcast.)

It has to be a hoax.

It has to. 

Anger (Stage 2)

Hua smashes a flower pot. 

“Li Hua!” shouts her mother, but she ignores her. She stares at the plants strewn on the hardwood floors, and she wonders who will die first: her, or the flowers. Her hands clench into fists, and she growls, reaching for her violin and ramming it into the wall. “Stop!” 

“Why should I?” she screams, clutching her mother’s shoulders. “It doesn’t matter! We’ll all be dead soon!” Tears are streaming down her face, and she sniffs, scrubbing her eyes. She got a scholarship to the best university in the country. She is first chair in her orchestra. Today is her first anniversary. None of it matters.

Something hot and terrifying sits in her stomach — a boiling hate that rises up, consuming her every thought. She finally understands what it means to see red. 

“Hua-” her mother says, taking her hand, but she slaps it off, pushing her away. She stumbles, tumbling onto the broken glass on the floor, and she winces, letting out a small gasp of pain. Hua’s eyes widen, and she stands, backing away slowly. A piece of glass is embedded into her mother’s palm, and it’s bleeding, thick smears of blood trickling down her forearm and sinking into the cloth of her jacket.

She clutches her stomach, runs out of the room, and cries. 

Bargaining (Stage 3)

James feels like his chest is caving in. His eyes are wide and glassy, and he purses his lips, raking his hands through his hair. “They can’t be serious,” he mutters, stumbling off his bed to stare at the sky. It’s dark out — he can barely make out the clouds. They paint the heavens in jagged swaths of red. 

He can almost picture what must be happening in the upper atmosphere — the crushing weight of a falling star being dragged to the Earth’s surface with pressure and friction making flames from air; colossal chunks of rock being torn away from the meteor rocketing towards them, damaging the whole but not enough-

The Earth is bleeding.

“There must be something we can do. Anything,” he says, voice cracking. 

Christine leans into him, squeezing his shoulder. “I have contacts in CERN. They know people from NASA.” She bites her lip, grabbing her glasses and her phone. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” she recites, swallowing hard. 

“Dylan Thomas,” he recalls. He chuckles hoarsely. The last time he heard that phrase, he was eighteen, stupid, and covered in strawberry jam. But she knows that. She was there. He can forget the blood-red skies if he closes his eyes and takes her hand. And he wants to. It’s all he wants. 

But there's work to be done. 

And if anyone could find a way out of this mess, it'd be Christine. 

Depression (Stage 4)

Harry sits on their couch, staring at the ceiling blankly. 

Fat tears roll down their cheeks, and they close their eyes, taking a deep breath in. Their phone rings, and they throw it across the room, smiling when it smashes into the kitchen counter. The ringing stops, and they roll over, tipping themselves onto their back. 

They lick their lips, staring out the window and trying to count the number of birds flying through their yard. Their house’s backyard opens to a chunk of greenspace, and they leave birdseed in the birdfeeder everyday. 

They stay there for what might have been minutes, or hours, and though they’re hungry, and thirsty, they can’t bring themselves to move. What’s the point? What’s the point of doing anything at all?

Which would hurt more, they wonder, jumping off of a building, or being crushed to death by a meteor? It sounds like a thought experiment they might have asked their mother when they were younger, and they wonder whether it was their mother calling on the phone earlier. A weight settles in their stomach, but they brush it aside, leaning back on their seat and resting their head on the drywall. 

Their breath is coming quickly, and their head is pounding. They put their face in their knees, wrapping their arms around their head and digging their nails into the back of their neck.

They’re going to die.

They’re going to die.

Acceptance (Curtain Call)

Janice sprawls out on her couch with her arms wrapped around her partner’s shoulders. Her dog’s head is in her lap, and her head is buried in Carrie’s side. She looks out the window, staring blankly at the crimson clouds. 

“It’s hauntingly beautiful,” she whispers, squeezing Carrie’s hand and kissing her on the cheek. 

Carrie ruffles her hair. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.” 

It’s cruel, she thinks, to dangle this splendor in front of unprepared minds as a herald of death. She is a poet by trade, and she thinks that if she only had the time, she could rhapsodize about this feeling; the inevitable approach of non-being; the sky torn open in a rictus of pain, crying tears of ash and fire. 

She looks at Carrie, and her words slip from her grasp. Her mind is blank and full; clear and muddy. She’s a mess of contradictions, and Carrie is the order to her chaos. 

“I love you,” she promises, blinking rapidly. “I’ll love you for the rest of my life, and I’ll keep loving you for a thousand years after that.” 

(She doesn’t say, You are what makes life worth living.)

(She doesn’t say, Your smile contains the light of all the stars in the galaxy.)

(She doesn’t say, loving you is a choice I will never regret — if I had another chance, I would do it all the same.) 

(She doesn’t say, I wish we had more time.)

“I know,” says Carrie. “I love you more,” she teases, bringing her closer and tucking Janice into her side. She’s warm. 

“I’m scared,” she says, hushed, as if she’s confessed to a crime. “I don’t want to die.” 

“I know. That’s alright.” She smiles. “I’m here with you. I’ll always be here.”

Janice’s lips curl. “I know.”

It’s an unshakable fact of the universe — Carrie will always be there. 

“Will you hold me?” asks Carrie. “Until the very end?”

“Until the very end.”