SFW

“At World’s End”

Breathe.
In–hold.
Long, slow, out–hold.
Repeat until the bones in your legs regrow and the ground stops spinning out from under your boots.
The world is over, and it is just beginning.
Breathe.

You open your eyes and you see it again but you don’t: the giant mass of molten gray something that stretches from horizon to horizon, twinkling in a way which is almost pretty but winds up ghastly. It looks like a giant animal breathing and for all you know that could be what it is.  But even while your eyes peel themselves blind looking at this thing a memory plays behind your raw ocular nerves of you: small and bright and untethered, playing on a long-ago spring morning in your parents’ backyard. 

It had been just a little chilly in the shadows, cold against your bare feet on that insistent concrete, but bright and warm and soft in the sunlit crabgrass, and as you’d danced from one spot of sunshine to the next you had imagined you were a pixie or a fairy or an elf, singing a nonsense song as sweetly as you could and imagining that the world could hear you and loved you for your sweetness.  Loved you more than the people who were supposed to protect you but who wound up screaming themselves so raw at night that they slogged through the morning like sour smoke clouds.  On that morning you were fey royalty and you conjured so many tiny voices to cheer you that it erased the tightness you’d felt when you cried and gasped and ached and no one answered. 

In the heavy presence of what has arrived to give the once-endless sky its terminus you wonder if you will ever know warmth or sunshine or sweetness ever again.  You wonder how long it will take; if it will be short because the thing in the sky is going to swallow you up or if it will be long, too long, so long that you wish it would have just swallowed you up after all.  You think of all the things that would be worse than death that could happen on the other side of this moment.

You shudder and can no longer hold it back, the tsunami at your borders, and tears and sweat and a loosening in your bowels all hit at the walls of your flesh at once and you feel yourself sinking, falling away from that frame of meat and bone, as a sound fills the air.  It sounds like it could be your own scream, ripping through you to gnaw at the wind, but it thrums all around you, too, and into you, picking apart your molecules and swaddling them up safe safe safe.  The world dissolves into color and softness and you realize how silly you were, just a moment ago, fearing you would never know goodness again.

Here is goodness.  Here is sweetness.  Here is warmth, seeping and lush.  Here is something warm and sinewy sweeping you up.  You are not you anymore, you are they, and you are we, and we are dancing and humming and gliding, an infinite cloud of pieces that all taste like joy. We had feared doom when the visitor gifted our skies, but there is no apocalypse here. 

We are coming, Mother.