Last Light

Flash literary fiction. A woman witnesses the slow death of our world.

Minutes.

She watched the sun contort its hot rotund into the west where columns of smoke rose and broke the bands of ocher meridian. Monolithic infrastructure like colossal gravestones angular beneath the failing light. The pneumatic hum of the data center at her back where inlets of freshwater delved out of the old farmlands subsequently expulsed from the complex in cyclonic emanations of steam and gas. She flicked the smouldering stogie butt across the barren terrain now alien to the earth of her childhood. Dream of a bedroom. The violet curtains.

Now and then she considered the mounds of burning bodies. Burial crews rewarded with extra rations. All gone. Pitiful bracken sprouting from the concrete and yellowed with the rain. They swear it is harmless. What can we do? She wonders if god will come knocking and bring within such ebullient manifestation an infrastructure to the world and that contained within or if it all simply ends with dark and silence. Alarm bells and the workers resumed their stations. What fraught few remained. The sun had departed yet the vanguard of night was drained of stars like sand filtered through a sieve. She’d thought to count them someday.

Days.

Talk among the workforce of new horizons. Colonies on other worlds. The same empty promises they’ve heard for years and yet the human mind was quick to forget and quicker to conjure empty hope. Like ants in a terrarium. She bore the weight of the child dead those five years and marveled at grief’s colonization of the heart. No one acknowledged her tears until one colleague growled an oath to report her. The work resumed.

A simple task. Guard the infrastructure. Keep the profits flowing. Why? Questions resulted in termination and she knew better. The dead were already waiting, innumerable, like the departed extraterrestrial worlds which lurked beyond the smogbank. A rackety cough that would not disperse. Spine hunched forward like some discordant protohuman. Red spittle drying on the floor, on her shoes. An announcement. Drones are now required to utilize workplace dormitories. No offsite travel. Twenty hour workdays.

Years.

Old age gripped bones and wrung translucent flesh to hang from such. Dwindling hive replicated by machinery. She imagined the shelf of grass stationed along the swell of rapids which tumbled and fractured loose soil from the walls of the gully where exposed bramble roots drank beneath the sun. Colors of the ultraviolet in the mist. They had made love to the tempo of the roaring waters, the taste of huckleberries and sweat residual upon the tongue. Yellow sun. Impossible now to reckon if such had been a dream or of the corporeal and in the end it did not matter. There was only the labor.

An understanding that when she dies there will be no ceremony. No mourners. She will be carted away like carrion and that will be the end. What to be done? The past remained so beneath the prism of remembrance. The future without concern.

She is the last. A steel sepulcher containing the totality of human knowledge and none to reap it. At night the rockets howl into the stratosphere and disappear beneath the ashen gloam. Fiery rain and debris return to the earth in silent red streaks. The cosmos remain masked. No food in weeks. Protect the data, the orator repeats. A radio somewhere. Lifetime wasted in front of a screen. The child’s name burning within her senescent memory. How might the claws of the underworld be so gentle yet so mechanized? Tentacular movement from the shadows. She says: I am the goddess who sings in the open rain and recalls the starlight. I am the tree which nests at the summit of the world.

Eternity.

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