Job

Fade in from black.  

Final episode.

Last season.

Location: Remote island, somewhere.

Crowd cheering.  Opening title.

Welcome to…

The Ultimate Survivor.

Somewhere in Hollywood. 

The host stands before a crowd with a background of Job.

The final contender.

"And now, our final survivor. Let's see how long he can tolerate this hell, ladies and gentlemen. Certainly not long. Nobody has survived!”

An applause sign lights and a consecutive cadence of cheers and screams roar in the background.

"And this man needs no introduction. I give you, Job!”

Scene 1.

The gravestones are marked with the names of prior contestants. The clay soil and sand absorb the day's heat in the blue light. Job can feel it through the floors of his shoes. Past smoking oblique shacks and yelping dogs, the city decays under the slow catechism of neglect, wires hanging poll to pull. A world beyond all fantasy. Blown lightbulbs like polyps, shattered and semi-translucent. The night is quiet, like a company of soldiers before battle. In the fallen light, there is faint summer lightning. A curtain rises on the Western world, a gust of black soot, dead beetles, and anonymous small bones.  

The last man stands in the universe as it fades about him. He regrets all things connected to a single sorrow. Once connected to a dollar bill, he does not know what he now lives for. Perhaps, the sad and exhaustive pieces of what was once a soul. If such a day exists, he won't discover a single god-made artifact to lead him on this final day. He lights a candle, leaning in the darkness. In the black beyond, he beholds all of the world, leading itself to its own destruction. 

At dawn, a widowed spider lingers on his comforter; it tips on its belly, exposing a crimson hourglass. He smashes it with a flat palm when it scuttles towards him. He finds an abandoned log house secluded and surrounded by a decaying orchard. Branches bare and sharp like a collection of colorless blades scratching at the fluctuating wind. As the sun sets, he'd walk amidst the field of naked trees where crows would gather and occasionally call out words that could only mean something prophetic. 

He knew not what. They'd come in slow, scattered flight from the penumbra above, clouds shrinking and swelling to expose the crest of a bone-tinted moon. When the sky was clear, he'd listen to them calling one another as the oblique lighting of the stars illuminated a passing horizon. The crows would eventually take flight in tandem.  

Rarely did he move beyond the plight of land after a year in the cabin. He had discovered nothing but rotting debris. There are old tires and bricks and broken canning jars. He sniffs the rank air, and he throws a rock he is carrying at a macabre menagerie of hanging bodies. He came up through a rugged trail that had branched off a main road. There is broken and useless debris rotting under the late summer sun. Old, tired, bricks, and shattered glass jars, accompanied by a rusty chicken feeder. 

Cut.

Hollywood.

"Well?! How's that for perseverance? Are we thinking he's the ultimate survivor, or what? Can we please give it up for Mr. Job, Ladies and Gentlemen? Grab your tablets in front of you, and let's make preliminary votes! Maybe, crazy, or oh yeah…Baby! What do we think? Can Job possibly survive this onslaught of terror? Or will he break? Stay tuned, folks, after these words from our sponsors.”

Actor: (Tears well in the man’s eyes) “Not that I don’t love you…I mourn every time I can’t get it up in the morn…”

Actress: “I’ll always love you.” (Grabbing his ass and pulling him in.)

The camera cuts to a blue pill with a background of a man falling on top of a woman.

P.O.V. shot of man, sweating profusely.

Actor: “And then I saw my doctor…”

Actress: (Disshelvald hair, running makeup, POV) “He saw the doctor…Yes! Yes!”

Overvoice: “Viagralis, making men across America from zero…to… (woman moans), Hero!”

Refrain.

Fade in from black.

Scene 2.

When spring came, he only wandered briefly from the cabin. The shadows cast from the trees still held a gray chill, and the sun reached upon the baleful world below where beasts and remaining men would roam in violent sprees. In the sparsely growing miscanthus and Iris barrens of hardened clay, other flowers wound erupt haphazardly through sand and cinder. As the days grew warm, baptisia and balloon flowers would dab the earth's surface with splotches of lavender, red, green, and white. Bodies that the cold once preserved would become soft with rot. 

A cistern contued to provide water. There was no power or gasoline to start it. Its cord, knotted and tangled, would not even pull. A rusty iron stove would burn wood where he cooked beans and rice and some remaining cans of spam he found in the dead leaves around the perimeter. Wrapped in an old wool blanket, he'd read the poetry of T.S. Eliot and John Milton. Job studies mathematics and French and write letters to the people he’d once loved. When he lifted his pen, he'd observe hordes of birds collapsing to branches and weighing the shaking trees.

The cabin contained three bedrooms and three windows. His preference was the back room, where beyond its window was a wall of weeds that had grown as high as the eves. The sloped foundation had clustered bouquets of weeds and thorn bushes, and the only thing a traveler might see were the collapsed holes of the mossy grey roof and broken chimney jutting upwards stained in soot and ash. He had stomped a clear path to the back door where nests of black widow scurried about thick cotton webs. He had once tried to clear them with a corrugated and stiff cardboard rhombus but found their poky legs gripped beneath the logs, waiting to rebuild their dense, silky homes.

He'd trace the perimeter of the orchard, and reaching the far side, he'd observe the falling red sun flare low and wide across the west. The desolate horizon refracted pools that looked like puddles of blood. The mud beneath his feet made it feel like he was standing on the back of some unknown creature, breathing and shifting a bony and arched spine with every step. Soon, the sun drained, and in an instant, the darkness fell.

On his way back, he'd stop by a nearly collapsed outhouse with a cracked wooden seat that resembled an oversized splintered horseshoe. Ivy and moss had grown over, and it sat tilting to one side, almost entirely collapsing in a wet hole where thistle and grass had grown from the sides like a mutated brown font. He passed behind, where he would trudge through clotted dirt and nightshade, where he would squat and shit. He wiped with a smooth leaf, then pulled his pants up as he studied a cat's balding rear held high and taught chewing and lapping at a corpse and its meatless skull, slurping at an upturned eye socked filled with dirty rainwater. The feline chews on a lipless grin, slurping past corroding teeth to chew on a diseased tongue.

Cut. 

Fade to black.

A word from our sponsors.

Actress 1: "Do you ever feel… not so fresh?"

Actress 2" "Sure, but that is why there is Summer Breeze douche with all-natural ingredients."

Actress 1: "Natural ingredients?"

Actress 2: "Yes, all-natural! And with scents like Lavender Ocean and summer breeze, you can rest assured that you will feel naturally fresh."

Overvoice: "Femni-fresh. Guaranteed to make you feel fresh and clean!

Actress 1 and 2: (In unison) “We love you Job!”

Fade in from black.

Scene 3:

When the sun rose, he'd careen down the hill and find the worn and cracked blacktop that was once a road, scouring for dead animals, finding muskrats or raccoons, occasionally nutria or rabbits. The reaches of the sun burning from the west would fall, and he'd walk the hill back to the cabin. He'd skin the bounty and set the hides to curate. He pulled the remaining maggots from the exposed muscle and tendons, then cooked them over the rot-iron stove until the meat had become juicy and warm.

On occasion, he'd remain longer, sheathed in his blanket, staring aimlessly at the moon, tilted and arced in slow motion around a population dead and gone, mercilessly rotting without the divine hand of a mortician's trade preparing them for their final farewell. Other birds would fly and gather on an old power line. They quietly sat in harmony until departing in a flawless formation further west.

It snowed during the night. The cold violet light softly projected the irregular flakes. Piles and small mounds nestled to branches and twigs like pale frosting. The silence was heavy and thin, and occasionally, he stopped to listen. The cold scales dodged out of the blackness to settle on his lashes. It covers the sludge, dirt, and craggy chunks of loose aggregate and lays a white lattice on otherwise deep cracks in the hardened clay. 

The flakes impinge with a delicate and momentary whisper. Toiling to reach the cabin uphill, he experiences a surreal and ethereal transformation from what had once been familiar. The rind of a moon lay cocked in the sky, and the world looked cold and blue. He can see the stocks of weeds dead in the yard. Beyond them, the barren and pestilential locust wood.

Pastel dome lights appear to adorn the black void of space, emitting a yellow glow. The rhomboid light became brighter than the sun, magnifying previously unseen things. From his cabin, he sees a consecutive series of light wires running from pole to pole like sagging black rubber bands. He walked the path to the back door as sprinkles fell from the sky. A dozen or more crows spook and flail above him with a faint rasping sound as their wings clap. The shards of ice began to melt and fall as if porcelain was being shattered in the raging hands of a madman. 

The intensity of harmonized light waves dimmed and deflated, and as if the hand of god commanded the colorless winter evening to suddenly stop, the world once again transformed and returned to a realm desolate and bare, like a subtle and hopeless snapshot of an old photograph that captured the ugliest acts of mankind.

Scene 4: 

At nightfall, tremors of terror make him scream and shriek. He covers his ears, and after a while, his screaming stops, and he laughs until he cries. His body shakes with tremors, and he stiffens and bites his lips. The seizure passes. He dozes off and, for a minute or two, thinks that something is approaching. The night and lightning boomed through the windows, snapping rays that seemed to crack the glass. He sat up quickly in a cold sweat, expecting the windows to magnify the light again. He grabbed a lamp and the hunting knife he skinned the animals with. He replaced the wick, lit it, and replaced the chimney. He holds the lamp up and sees the man sitting in the corner.

Lights flash around the small cabin. 

Applause.

The audience roars.

The man in the corner holds a mike and stands up, only to be bombarded by a series of sharp stabs that open his arteries and intestines.

Scene 5:

The host spits and chokes on blood.

His pupils dilate.

He can only whisper as the camera zooms in on his face while Job repeatedly stabs him.

He mutters before the blade crosses his throat, "Winner, folks."

His crisp white shirt and tie splattered in blood.

“The…Ultimate survivor…”

Cut. 

A white noise hushed by a vibrato of flickering static.