The End of the World (Part 2)
Note: Some language in this story may make it unsuitable for younger readers.
I was walking home from school when it happened. I had my music playing in my earbuds pretty loud. I was shuffling along and caught up in my thoughts. How much time would my homework take that night? How would the novel I was reading end? How old would I be when I got to go on my first date?
I heard someone shout behind me, but since I’d reached my yard and my mailbox, and since I was enjoying my thoughts and my music, I decided to pay it no mind.
Then I felt tired all of a sudden. It was no big deal. It was like I’d gotten up from the sofa too fast. You know the feeling – you feel a bit light-headed and dark in the eyes for a moment before it passes and you feel right as rain again. I put my left hand on our mailbox to steady myself, looked down at the ground for a moment, and then shook my head a few times to clear out the sensation. I remember feeling really thirsty too. Real thirsty.
When I looked back up, Momma was there. She had an all-business look in her eyes. She talked to me firmly and without an ounce of doubt.
“DeMarco,” she said. “The world is ending. It’s ending right now. It’s not a joke anymore. We have to leave this moment. Just you and me. We need to go now. Just you and me. No room for anyone else. Don’t worry. I know where we can go. I’ve been preparing for this. I’ve been preparing for years.”
Confused, I nodded agreement. Then I got tired again and fell asleep. I must have slept for ages because when I awakened we were here in this place. I had no idea how my Momma found this place and afforded it and hid its existence from my Dad and the rest of the family.
But she had.
And we were here now. And Momma was happy. And I felt good. After that, each day just stretched into the next, and as the world beyond us at last fell in upon itself, we remained together and safe.
When I soft knock on the door and enter her bedroom, I see my Momma snuggled under her covers but still awake.
Her room is simple in its decor. The only thing on her wall is a small Jesus dying on a small cross above her bed. I wonder about it every time I enter her room. We're not Roman Catholics. We're not even really hyper-Christian or anything.
But there it is up on her wall. I wonder why she doesn't have a still life of fruit instead, since she likes to cook so much, but all she has is her little Jesus on his little cross, which – truth be told – isn't particularly appetizing at all.
I asked Momma about her crucifix once. She thought for a while and finally said, "Well, Son, he's God and he's innocent, but still they killed him like a dog, so he's all right with me."
I felt like this should have made sense to me, but it didn't, so I decided to play it off with a little humor. I shook my head with maximum gravitas, dug my voice down as deep as I could, and called out, "Preach it, Woman! Word!"
In response, Momma reached out toward me like she was gonna bonk me on the head. But at the last moment she spread her fingers and stroked my scalp a few times. And she laughed long and strong.
"Word? Word? Really, DeMarco? What year do you think it is? Do you think it's MC Hammer-time or something? Do you think Cameo is on tour? Really? WORD?!?"
She petted my head a few more times. Then she leaned over and kissed me on my right temple and whispered, "You can make anything a joke. I always loved that about you."
I come back from my memories and look at my Momma. She's gazing up at me through eyes that are peeking above the hem of her bed sheets. She looks so tiny and reduced.
She scoots up in bed a little. Now I can see her all the way to her waist. She's in the old, ratty nightgown she always wears in the evening. She's also crying. Momma reaches out to me and asks me to hold her. I go to her and hold her.
I hold her until she falls asleep a half hour later. I know she's asleep because I hear an even whistle of breath squeaking through her nose. I slide past her, switch off her light, go back to my room, climb in bed, and promptly fall asleep.
A few hours later I wake up and the disappearing girl from the base of my ladder is there to greet me.
As a thirteen-year-old and as a boy, I am embarrassed to admit that I love little kittens, but I do. I love little kitties. They relax me. I am further embarrassed to admit that I have a small poster of a gray and white kitty on my wall beside my bed. The kitten has blue eyes. I like to stare at it as I fall asleep at night.
All of this is simply a way of telling you that I fall asleep facing the wall with my back to the window. And that is what I did after leaving my Momma asleep in her bed.
So after a while I wake up. It feels too warm in my room. I flip around away from the wall, and the girl is there, sitting on the edge of my bed, a foot away and staring at me. It's like she just flew into my room through the window like some sort of moonbeam or something.
Her white dress is even more damaged than it was earlier. It’s now so torn up that in some places I can see the darkness of her skin coming through the white of the abused fabric. In the moonlight the contrast between the skin and cloth is heightened and transfixing to me.
I let out a squeal of shock and the girl "shhh-es" me like she had from the base of my ladder. I blink my eyes four or five times, but this time she doesn’t disappear. Instead she offers me her hand. I act on impulse and take it. Her hand is dark, just like Momma’s and mine.
The girl leads me down the stairs until we reach the ground floor. She leads me across the immense lobby of our home until we reach the front door. She leads me through the doorway and into the dust of our front yard.
In the shine of a supermoon I notice that there are footprints of grass breaking the monotony of the dirt, a chain of repetitively-shaped green islands in a brown sea. They stretch off from beyond our front porch until they are hidden from sight by distance and dark.
There is no sign of Momma, and the girl seems unconcerned that, at any moment, Momma could appear. On the front porch the girl pauses to look at me and smiles. Then we walk off into the yard and into the dirt fields beyond. It seems like we are retracing the now green path steps that brought her here.
And we walk and walk and walk. We walk for what must be hours, but the moon seems frozen in the sky, and my hand is frozen in her hand. We walk, and I become so tired that without any warning for her (and barely any for me), I slump to the ground in a wave of fatigue and fall asleep with my head pillowed upon one of her green, grassy footprints.
Sometime later I wake up because of a small, repeating shudder moving through my body. The shudder is from the impact of the girl’s footsteps. We are still walking through the endless moonlight. Rather, the girl is still walking. I am not walking. She is carrying me.
How is this possible? A ten-year-old girl carrying me? But it's happening whether I consider it possible or not. I look up at her face and her eyes are fixed ahead of us. It’s like she’s honing in on something I can’t yet see.
She's carrying me with my face to the sky and her arms under my armpits and knees. I glance down the length of my body and my eyes finally focus on the fingers of her left hand which are pressed against the flesh of my right leg in a steady, strong grip.
I concentrate my attention on her left hand because of a ring she wears on her third finger. It sparkles in the moonlight. It’s a large ring, an engagement ring. (I have no interest in jewelry. I am a teenage boy devoted to kittens, but even I have my limits. Nonetheless, I know an engagement ring when I see one.)
The ring is of striking design. Three large, showy diamonds are stacked together in the shape of a triangle and set off by a simple, silver band.
It looks far too large for a girl this age and size, but it seems to fit her, at least physically. I put “tiny ten-year-old girl carrying me while wearing a big-ass engagement ring” in my growing file of un-answerables. I file it right beside the grass that sprouts from her tracks and the moon that appears stuck in the sky (and why our house is so damn big, of course).
I respond to all this weirdness not by screaming but by falling back to sleep. My last waking thought is not of my Momma or what will happen next but about how maybe, if we walk far enough, I won't have to climb any more ladders and wash any more solar panels.
When I awake I am lying on the dirt and the sky is still filled with night and the everlasting moon. The girl is sitting to my right with her knees bent up and her arms locked around them.
Immediately to her right is an old, farm-style, barb-wire border fence. I have never seen it before. It stretches as far as I can see in either direction. The fence is ramshackle and thoroughly unimpressive, the kind of thing that would be able to contain only the dumbest and most suggestible of cows.
The girl is staring at me again, and I get the feeling she's been keeping vigil at my side, waiting for me to open my eyes. My hunch is confirmed because once I do open them she’s set in motion.
The girl leans over and gives me a kiss, a big smack on the center of the forehead. She chases the kiss with a little giggle. It is the first vocal sound I’ve heard her make.
Then she rises to her feet, moves to the fence, and with her left hand separates the wires. She gestures with her right hand for me to step through the fence to the other side of the border.
There is an unnecessary, overwrought dignity to what she does. The fence is so porous and ineffective that I don’t need her to make a way through it for me. Her waving me through the gap is done with the over-large gesture of someone performing on a stage. This makes what the girl does feel like a ritual, or perhaps the physical incantation of a magical spell.
I step through without delay. I do not meet her eyes again. I do not bid her goodbye.
As I step through the fence some sort of switch is thrown by the universe and everything changes.
My feet rise up from brown dust and land upon vibrant, green grass. The moon morphs into a hot sun riding across a blue sky. The scattered, scrubby, half-dead trees disappear. In their place rise burly oaks in the prime of life and row after row of carefully chiseled, oblong stones that weave through the bases of the tree trunks.
The girl is swapped for my Momma, who has somehow beaten me to this new place and now sits on the grass just a few feet from me. Her back is turned to me and her left arm hangs across a smooth-cut stone. Her arm dangles over the stone like it’s an old friend.
Momma keeps a slow beat on the top of the stone with the underside of her ring, a silver band holding three diamonds laid in a triangular pattern. The tapping of her beat is the only sound I hear.
Momma has not arrived here the same woman I left in her bedroom hours ago. She is still petite, but she is suddenly old. Her hair, which is piled atop her head in a bun, matches the color of the gravestone against which she leans, and the chocolate of her neck seems to have grown ashen. Nonetheless, the woman near me is definitely Momma.
Her back is to me, but the front of the small gravestone is pointed in my direction. Her arm obscures the name and date I'd expect such a stone to display, but I can still read the inscription below her elbow:
Taken from us by a bullet in a moment,
You are held within our hearts forever.
I can see this scene with incredible clarity, but I don't really know how this is possible because I see everything through a fog of liquid fire. Somehow the fog seems to intensify my vision instead of dulling it. But, it would be incorrect to say that I watch Momma through the fog as if it were a window pane standing between the two of us.
The fog is everywhere, and it surrounds everything on this side of the barb-wire fence. The fog is an ocean in which I float, from which I feel all my cells feed, and into which I myself flow. There are others in the fog, although I cannot see them like I see Momma. They are a vast multitude.
I don't know what to say to Momma, but that's okay because she speaks first. "DeMarco, I need to stop squeezin'. I need to stop squeezin'." Then, after a pause, as if her words were a magic spell requiring three repetitions to be effective, Momma says again, "I need to stop squeezin', my Love."
I still don't know what to say to her, but then the words come into me from the fog itself, or rather they come into me from another who stands somewhere beside me in the fog and wants to bless me with the exact gift I require in my moment of need.
I sense instantly that he knows words I do not know. I know instantly that he himself lived long ago during another time in which the world was ending, and in that sad time he tended and nursed the hurting.
I speak his words to my Momma as my own. I say, "I celebrate myself. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." My voice, at least to my ears, no longer crackles with the onset of puberty. It sounds like organ thunder and the vacuum of space.
My Momma nods and smiles and then all goes supernova and is well.
I heard someone shout behind me, but since I’d reached my yard and my mailbox, and since I was enjoying my thoughts and my music, I decided to pay it no mind.
Then I felt tired all of a sudden. It was no big deal. It was like I’d gotten up from the sofa too fast. You know the feeling – you feel a bit light-headed and dark in the eyes for a moment before it passes and you feel right as rain again. I put my left hand on our mailbox to steady myself, looked down at the ground for a moment, and then shook my head a few times to clear out the sensation. I remember feeling really thirsty too. Real thirsty.
When I looked back up, Momma was there. She had an all-business look in her eyes. She talked to me firmly and without an ounce of doubt.
“DeMarco,” she said. “The world is ending. It’s ending right now. It’s not a joke anymore. We have to leave this moment. Just you and me. We need to go now. Just you and me. No room for anyone else. Don’t worry. I know where we can go. I’ve been preparing for this. I’ve been preparing for years.”
Confused, I nodded agreement. Then I got tired again and fell asleep. I must have slept for ages because when I awakened we were here in this place. I had no idea how my Momma found this place and afforded it and hid its existence from my Dad and the rest of the family.
But she had.
And we were here now. And Momma was happy. And I felt good. After that, each day just stretched into the next, and as the world beyond us at last fell in upon itself, we remained together and safe.
When I soft knock on the door and enter her bedroom, I see my Momma snuggled under her covers but still awake.
Her room is simple in its decor. The only thing on her wall is a small Jesus dying on a small cross above her bed. I wonder about it every time I enter her room. We're not Roman Catholics. We're not even really hyper-Christian or anything.
But there it is up on her wall. I wonder why she doesn't have a still life of fruit instead, since she likes to cook so much, but all she has is her little Jesus on his little cross, which – truth be told – isn't particularly appetizing at all.
I asked Momma about her crucifix once. She thought for a while and finally said, "Well, Son, he's God and he's innocent, but still they killed him like a dog, so he's all right with me."
I felt like this should have made sense to me, but it didn't, so I decided to play it off with a little humor. I shook my head with maximum gravitas, dug my voice down as deep as I could, and called out, "Preach it, Woman! Word!"
In response, Momma reached out toward me like she was gonna bonk me on the head. But at the last moment she spread her fingers and stroked my scalp a few times. And she laughed long and strong.
"Word? Word? Really, DeMarco? What year do you think it is? Do you think it's MC Hammer-time or something? Do you think Cameo is on tour? Really? WORD?!?"
She petted my head a few more times. Then she leaned over and kissed me on my right temple and whispered, "You can make anything a joke. I always loved that about you."
I come back from my memories and look at my Momma. She's gazing up at me through eyes that are peeking above the hem of her bed sheets. She looks so tiny and reduced.
She scoots up in bed a little. Now I can see her all the way to her waist. She's in the old, ratty nightgown she always wears in the evening. She's also crying. Momma reaches out to me and asks me to hold her. I go to her and hold her.
I hold her until she falls asleep a half hour later. I know she's asleep because I hear an even whistle of breath squeaking through her nose. I slide past her, switch off her light, go back to my room, climb in bed, and promptly fall asleep.
A few hours later I wake up and the disappearing girl from the base of my ladder is there to greet me.
As a thirteen-year-old and as a boy, I am embarrassed to admit that I love little kittens, but I do. I love little kitties. They relax me. I am further embarrassed to admit that I have a small poster of a gray and white kitty on my wall beside my bed. The kitten has blue eyes. I like to stare at it as I fall asleep at night.
All of this is simply a way of telling you that I fall asleep facing the wall with my back to the window. And that is what I did after leaving my Momma asleep in her bed.
So after a while I wake up. It feels too warm in my room. I flip around away from the wall, and the girl is there, sitting on the edge of my bed, a foot away and staring at me. It's like she just flew into my room through the window like some sort of moonbeam or something.
Her white dress is even more damaged than it was earlier. It’s now so torn up that in some places I can see the darkness of her skin coming through the white of the abused fabric. In the moonlight the contrast between the skin and cloth is heightened and transfixing to me.
I let out a squeal of shock and the girl "shhh-es" me like she had from the base of my ladder. I blink my eyes four or five times, but this time she doesn’t disappear. Instead she offers me her hand. I act on impulse and take it. Her hand is dark, just like Momma’s and mine.
The girl leads me down the stairs until we reach the ground floor. She leads me across the immense lobby of our home until we reach the front door. She leads me through the doorway and into the dust of our front yard.
In the shine of a supermoon I notice that there are footprints of grass breaking the monotony of the dirt, a chain of repetitively-shaped green islands in a brown sea. They stretch off from beyond our front porch until they are hidden from sight by distance and dark.
There is no sign of Momma, and the girl seems unconcerned that, at any moment, Momma could appear. On the front porch the girl pauses to look at me and smiles. Then we walk off into the yard and into the dirt fields beyond. It seems like we are retracing the now green path steps that brought her here.
And we walk and walk and walk. We walk for what must be hours, but the moon seems frozen in the sky, and my hand is frozen in her hand. We walk, and I become so tired that without any warning for her (and barely any for me), I slump to the ground in a wave of fatigue and fall asleep with my head pillowed upon one of her green, grassy footprints.
Sometime later I wake up because of a small, repeating shudder moving through my body. The shudder is from the impact of the girl’s footsteps. We are still walking through the endless moonlight. Rather, the girl is still walking. I am not walking. She is carrying me.
How is this possible? A ten-year-old girl carrying me? But it's happening whether I consider it possible or not. I look up at her face and her eyes are fixed ahead of us. It’s like she’s honing in on something I can’t yet see.
She's carrying me with my face to the sky and her arms under my armpits and knees. I glance down the length of my body and my eyes finally focus on the fingers of her left hand which are pressed against the flesh of my right leg in a steady, strong grip.
I concentrate my attention on her left hand because of a ring she wears on her third finger. It sparkles in the moonlight. It’s a large ring, an engagement ring. (I have no interest in jewelry. I am a teenage boy devoted to kittens, but even I have my limits. Nonetheless, I know an engagement ring when I see one.)
The ring is of striking design. Three large, showy diamonds are stacked together in the shape of a triangle and set off by a simple, silver band.
It looks far too large for a girl this age and size, but it seems to fit her, at least physically. I put “tiny ten-year-old girl carrying me while wearing a big-ass engagement ring” in my growing file of un-answerables. I file it right beside the grass that sprouts from her tracks and the moon that appears stuck in the sky (and why our house is so damn big, of course).
I respond to all this weirdness not by screaming but by falling back to sleep. My last waking thought is not of my Momma or what will happen next but about how maybe, if we walk far enough, I won't have to climb any more ladders and wash any more solar panels.
When I awake I am lying on the dirt and the sky is still filled with night and the everlasting moon. The girl is sitting to my right with her knees bent up and her arms locked around them.
Immediately to her right is an old, farm-style, barb-wire border fence. I have never seen it before. It stretches as far as I can see in either direction. The fence is ramshackle and thoroughly unimpressive, the kind of thing that would be able to contain only the dumbest and most suggestible of cows.
The girl is staring at me again, and I get the feeling she's been keeping vigil at my side, waiting for me to open my eyes. My hunch is confirmed because once I do open them she’s set in motion.
The girl leans over and gives me a kiss, a big smack on the center of the forehead. She chases the kiss with a little giggle. It is the first vocal sound I’ve heard her make.
Then she rises to her feet, moves to the fence, and with her left hand separates the wires. She gestures with her right hand for me to step through the fence to the other side of the border.
There is an unnecessary, overwrought dignity to what she does. The fence is so porous and ineffective that I don’t need her to make a way through it for me. Her waving me through the gap is done with the over-large gesture of someone performing on a stage. This makes what the girl does feel like a ritual, or perhaps the physical incantation of a magical spell.
I step through without delay. I do not meet her eyes again. I do not bid her goodbye.
As I step through the fence some sort of switch is thrown by the universe and everything changes.
My feet rise up from brown dust and land upon vibrant, green grass. The moon morphs into a hot sun riding across a blue sky. The scattered, scrubby, half-dead trees disappear. In their place rise burly oaks in the prime of life and row after row of carefully chiseled, oblong stones that weave through the bases of the tree trunks.
The girl is swapped for my Momma, who has somehow beaten me to this new place and now sits on the grass just a few feet from me. Her back is turned to me and her left arm hangs across a smooth-cut stone. Her arm dangles over the stone like it’s an old friend.
Momma keeps a slow beat on the top of the stone with the underside of her ring, a silver band holding three diamonds laid in a triangular pattern. The tapping of her beat is the only sound I hear.
Momma has not arrived here the same woman I left in her bedroom hours ago. She is still petite, but she is suddenly old. Her hair, which is piled atop her head in a bun, matches the color of the gravestone against which she leans, and the chocolate of her neck seems to have grown ashen. Nonetheless, the woman near me is definitely Momma.
Her back is to me, but the front of the small gravestone is pointed in my direction. Her arm obscures the name and date I'd expect such a stone to display, but I can still read the inscription below her elbow:
Taken from us by a bullet in a moment,
You are held within our hearts forever.
I can see this scene with incredible clarity, but I don't really know how this is possible because I see everything through a fog of liquid fire. Somehow the fog seems to intensify my vision instead of dulling it. But, it would be incorrect to say that I watch Momma through the fog as if it were a window pane standing between the two of us.
The fog is everywhere, and it surrounds everything on this side of the barb-wire fence. The fog is an ocean in which I float, from which I feel all my cells feed, and into which I myself flow. There are others in the fog, although I cannot see them like I see Momma. They are a vast multitude.
I don't know what to say to Momma, but that's okay because she speaks first. "DeMarco, I need to stop squeezin'. I need to stop squeezin'." Then, after a pause, as if her words were a magic spell requiring three repetitions to be effective, Momma says again, "I need to stop squeezin', my Love."
I still don't know what to say to her, but then the words come into me from the fog itself, or rather they come into me from another who stands somewhere beside me in the fog and wants to bless me with the exact gift I require in my moment of need.
I sense instantly that he knows words I do not know. I know instantly that he himself lived long ago during another time in which the world was ending, and in that sad time he tended and nursed the hurting.
I speak his words to my Momma as my own. I say, "I celebrate myself. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." My voice, at least to my ears, no longer crackles with the onset of puberty. It sounds like organ thunder and the vacuum of space.
My Momma nods and smiles and then all goes supernova and is well.