End of Time

The city now looked like a million burnt matches in an ashtray. I glanced towards the horizon, but realised there was none, and neither a sky, nor a sun to look up to, all life melted away, a Dali painting in the making.

Later I removed my mask, and smelt what I thought was roast pork on a rotisserie, but then saw the human bodies scattered, and vomited up a plume of ash.

At least the ash would dull my senses and so I engulfed it, until I could taste nothing, and my mouth was dried, and I was no more, turned to stone, a fossil in waiting, like one of those grotesques at Pompeii. But there would be no witness to this. I had tried contacting others several times over the last six months, and there was nothing, not a single person left, all human history, culture, spirit, life, obliterated, in the blink of an eye.

I had descended from the heights of Chimborazo, down into the Ecuadorian plane, and there I had slept, living off whatever food I could find. From the peak of Chimborazo I saw the land below change from a pallid green to a vibrant orange, and then as that colour dimmed to an ocre, I realised that this was the colour of sulphur, the sulphur of a million million lives destroyed by madness.

I had lived to see the end of the anthropocene, I said to myself, but then the absurdity of this dawned on me. The word “anthropocene” would die with me, and with it all the knowledge that humans had ever created.

I sat down in the ash, and half remembered going out on the moors one time when it had snowed and the feeling of complete isolation, of being separate from humanity. My eyes would have wept if there was water in my body, but they could not, and my mummified skin was as hard as leather. 

So I just kneeled down into the child's pose. I was afterall a child of humanity, the last child, and so it was time for me to sleep, perhaps to dream.

I felt my body merge into the earth and the snowy white ash fall upon me, and my breathing slow, and sensation pass from my viscera. I wondered what would be the next species to take over on the earth, or was this, the sixth mass extinction, to be the last. Surely some life would continue to exist, some bacteria, or virus, or perhaps a tardigrade.

I felt the blood begin to ooze out of my system as though I was now disembodying myself. There was a strange warmness to the feeling of my impending death, and then that warmness seemed to stir me. There was water falling through me. Drops turned to trickles and then trickles to gushes, and then before I knew it I was in the thrall of a giant river washing me down with rocks and mud and ash and my body contorted into shapes as though I was being pushed by Picasso’s brush as he painted Guernica. 

And I contorted and clenched like a sea anemone caught up in the flow and I made a dance that Bob Fosse would have been proud of swirled in the wild and wasteful ocean.

Was I dead now? Is this the afterlife? Is this the underworld? Do such things as afterlife or underworld mean anything?

I gently silted down onto the bed of a great ocean, and there I stayed, clam-like to bedrock, waiting for tomorrow. But tomorrow never came, and the water washed past me, and I emerged as an urchin from my crusty home, and looked up and saw the sunlight, and it was good, and it was very good.

The waves waxed and waned about me, washing away the ash, and from ash I have come and to ash I will return, and then my own tide moved acrid air in and out, and as it did I opened my eyes, spied the horizon again, and as if I was reanimated by Mary Shelly herself I came to life. My heart burst into rhythm and there I was, me, myself, I.

And then, as if seashells could become molluscs, so I became again. I was. To be or not to be, there was no question of being. I was doing. I was doing living, I was doing like I was human, the last human that, the last human that ever existed, that ever. I was alive!

I sucked seaweed for breakfast, and moss for lunch, and by dinnertime I was already eating snails, and slugs, and anything slippery that would quench my thirst and hunger.

On the second day I saw light and darkness, then on the third there was green flora and silvery fauna, and I ate and I drank and I vomited and shat, and peed and bled, and this went on and on and on until the fourth day when clouds gushed upwards during the day, and stars freckled blacker and blacker skies, and the universe said to me, “I’m back, and better than before”, and I just wondered why the universe would bother talking to me, this idiot here, yes the last one, of the homo sapiens, “homo sapiens ridiculousus” I shouted, futilely, for not even the universe could hear me, or wanted to hear the words of a madman.

I carried on, gathered wood, made a fire, began to cook, even found a way to cut my ragged beard, and sooth my sunburnt skin, but soon the futility of it all set in, and so, I decided that suicide was the most painless option. I even consulted with myself as though I was my own physician, and in a stern English-accented voice spoke calmly of my condition and why the recommendation from a trained professional was to end my life.

I decided that the best way to die was just to fade away, to stop eating, stop drinking. I had heard that after a few days without water a human will die. I climbed up from the beach and on to a grassy area above me, found a large piece of lush grass and just sat down in it and let the earth take me, as I slowly oozed away into a deep sleep.

__________

The passing through to the other side was not as I had expected. I felt a pain in my left side and then some wetness, and vibration. I moved a little and there I saw in front of me my saviour. There really was a god, I thought, and then looking at god for the first time through the sunlight I realised she was a woman.

“Oar uul ive” I heard, not a language I recognised, and then “You’re alive,” that was clear. I fell back to sleep. Some time later I awoke again to feel a fire in front of me, and me lying on rushes, and there in front of me was a figure dancing in the shadows, she came up to me and said “You are alive!”

I moved up into a sitting position and looked into her dark brown eyes. 

“Who are you?” I asked inquisitively. 

“I am Eve? What is your name?” she replied.

“My name is Adam,” I said.

And that was day one.