End of a Dream

I stared at the celestial body of Mars, burning orange against the dark-blue sky of Earth. The night was dead and the moon was hidden. A cloudless sky. A silent world. The city of skyscrapers had never before been so bare of all its monotone.

It was irony and a chuckle was the only remedy. People wondered if global warming would end us or perhaps nuclear decimation would do the trick. We liked to imagine the end of the world as something that could be stopped if only we all took great pains to care, and yet? The world was ending and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

"Really," I muttered, tongue stale and bitter, "Aren't you too funny, god?"

I had personally thought the world would end with an unresolvable bang, and it was both heart-pumping thrill and derision to know I was right. Yet as certain as it was that we would all perish—with Mars’ figure glazing the night sky—I didn’t feel any existential dread as I stared at the ever approaching colossal giant.

I sipped from my can of cheap, vending-machine coffee; it had grown lukewarm and stale and perhaps even more bitter, but two dollars was two dollars. I sat, dusty beach-chair upon the roof of my apartment complex, surrounded by silence and an oddly comforting chill. And I took things slowly, contemplating the idea that this was it.

My hands—my fingers—ached as if needing grease; a necessity to flex and type something. Anything. And, oh, there was a pile of new rejection letters to sift through. There always were those nice little envelopes with pretty pacifications; thorns carefully inlaid within rose-colored words, sure to slice my efforts into nothing, and create yet more scars on these very hands I had dared write with.

Still, it was a rubbish idea to only now write once more, when the world’s end bared its fangs so readily. I had tried my best, and I had failed—tired. The world was ending, and my dream to be published was to be snuffed out with it. There was, oddly enough, no tears.

I sighed and stared towards the horizon, as if to gaze beyond the massive force that would rip us all apart and reach the only person who could listen to my unresolved complaints.

“What a funny god.”

The door to the roof opened in sync with my snide musing and I turned my head, watching a figure lugging a standing canvas in one hand, and a box of what I assumed to be art supplies in the other.

It was a strange woman, small and nimble-looking, with a round pair of glasses stuck on her confined face. She was mouse-like, too. She looked left, looked right, and sighed in relief. Then she bothered to glance forward and see me for the first time and had the nerve to widen her eyes, and tremble as if I were a trap waiting to catch her. It was funny, in a way, and I wondered if she would head back the way she came, but she gazed at the night sky and the approaching doom and I knew then that she wasn’t here to walk back.

“I. . .didn’t expect someone else to already be here?” She said, walking carefully with all her dusty things, setting herself up before the canvas of the night sky. Now rushing and nimble with no moment for pondering.

“A lot of people consider it a good view,” I replied, eyeing her through the corner of my eyes. “Are you painting the end of the world?”

There were stains of tears at the corner of her eyes. There were dark circles unhidden. Yet, she grinned back at me like a mischievous child and nodded with the same naivety.

“I always wanted to be a painter, you know? Like Viktor Vasnetsov or John Martin or something. Of course, it didn’t happen, but I kept the stuff around. So, here, while this shitty world is going to end us all, I’ll take a breath and paint it,” She said, a brush in hold, her thumb tracing against it, her hand and fingers aching with a necessity to flex and paint. “My first real painting. The end of the world. Isn’t it poetic?”

Poetry? I chewed on her words. I had personally thought it was irony that my work had been rejected once more, but I suppose I might have been wrong. Was there beauty in finding defeat, again, even at the end of the world? Would she still grin so boldly if there was nothing to show for her work? If there was only rejection, would her poetry become comedy?

“No one will see it,” I reminded her, letting her hear clearly what torns shrouded in rose-colored words meant. “If not obliterated by the immediate destruction of two colliding planets, it’ll be burned by the remnant of them ending each other.”

“Well. . .” She stood ready, glancing at her empty canvas—a blank space as agonizing as any writer’s bare document. The hands holding her brush and palette were shaking, but she was grinning. “At least I would have tried it.”

I turned back to the colossal figure of Mars burning through our atmosphere. An orange stone the size of nothing we had ever seen meshing with the deep, dark blue of a silent, New York night. A brilliant pressure of burning ember against a magenta atmosphere, the clouds blown away by the approaching impact, the moon lost to the size of the certain collision, the world dead and silent of all its machinations; doom was irreversible and all was calm. Taking yet another sip of my two dollar vending-machine coffee, mesmerized from the bottom of my heart, I realized why my new rejection had not come with new tears.

“What a funny god,” I laughed.

The coffee was bitter and stale, like all dead dreams. Yet as I watched her paint her first stroke, the end of the world a background, I thought it tasted adequate.