DROPLETS

SO IT SWUNG from her neck, an entire universe in a droplet of moisture kept in Marcie’s locket. She looked across at the brat of a kid swinging hard next to her on the swing set and turned her nose up at him. She wanted the boy to see she’d ignored him on purpose.

The brat!

But Fletcher Melton, making faces and talking smack about the locket, was content to get on Marcie’s nerves.

This necklace was the biggest thing in her life. It was a gift from her parents when she’d turned seven. One of several gifts given that year for her birthday, but she liked this pendant most of all. The bike was fun, and she’d ridden it religiously. The clothes—she can’t remember over half of them, or where they’d gone. And the 54-piece Susie’s Playmaker Dollhouse and Accessories set, complete with furniture, throw rugs, curtains, and a shiny pink convertible, she’d altogether outgrown. She got rid of it the next spring during mom’s annual spring cleaning; they left it in the rain outside a Goodwill donation center. But the gold heart-shaped locket her parents gave her, was her prized possession. With gold leaflet-trimming all around it, it had a face of glass through which she could view the pretty orb of light swirling around inside on a cushion of black velvet. The universe was tiny but beautiful, rolling about most times like a bead of mercury, reflecting lights and changing colors ever so slightly when certain lights strike it.

"That ain't no universe!" spat Fletcher teasingly, swinging past. Cocking his head back, the boy threw his body forward with a thrust as high as the swing could carry him, then, swinging back down fast and heavy, he swung past Marcie, only to repeat the process again, each time distorting his face, sticking out his tongue.

"It is too a universe!" Marcie said, defending her gift. She wanted to tuck the pendant out of sight down her blouse, but that meant she’ll have to stop. She didn’t want to do that; she’s built up too much momentum swinging already and couldn’t imagine stopping on account of this wisenheimer… Boys can be annoying. She was barely ten now and knew she was way smarter than this blabbermouth--any day. Besides, she's lived with her prized ornament a full year before the Great Darkening hit and nearly two years since—and she knew for certain it was definitely a universe! Her parents told her it was, and she's never known them to lie to her. Her father had been a scientist at a private research facility in upstate New York, and even in their research, the possibilities of multiverses and twin universes--regardless to the size and scope of things, was every bit a possibility as was their own existence. Who’s to say they themselves weren’t specks of dust in some other child’s locket in some similar but peculiar universe? “Hahaha,” her daddy once joked to a colleague, “I wonder sometimes whether each time one of us sucks fluid up a dropper, if maybe another blackhole appears in some unsuspected universe…” He paused and looked up. “It could very well be that we’re a minuscule primordial soup of some kind, swirling around in some other scientist’s petri dish.”

And no one seemed to pay much attention at the time when odd but strange natural phenomena started happening. It came too soon—the end. It kind of snowballed. There were oceans swelling. The upper atmosphere seeming to overheat, charged with an excessive abundance of pollutants, began raining down fire in places and dropping hail the size of basketballs in others. Heat and cold spikes occurred in various parts of the globe, being oftentimes way out of the ordinary. It seemed their world was dying fast, with no recourse, no remedy in sight. Daily, millions, literally millions of people were losing their lives to extreme weather conditions, or some new unchallenged strains of biological outbreaks. Diseases without names or numbers. In some parts of the world, people hadn’t seen daylight in years.

So, upon their discovery in quantum mechanics of multiverses, it was noted that size doesn't matter when it comes to that field of study. In fact, the smaller the better and the more infinite the chances of other realms, or other worlds, or other times and spaces being possible—where a multitude of stringed-theory existences, coupled in a petri dish of water and fluids, with light energy, comes to life. Hence, the theory of a miniature universe confined in the locket swinging around Marcie's neck.

“Wooo, how pretty!” five-year-old Marcie had remarked one day as she and her mom visited the lab, upon seeing the pretty mercury-like bead of light, swishing around in a bowl. “What is it?” she’d asked. Her father had smiled and answered, “Our neighbors.”

About two and a half years later, near the time they closed the laboratory and people had to stay home because it got too hazardous to be out in the streets, Marcie’s dad got the idea to give her the universe as a keepsake. And it seemed barely believable that an entire universe could be contained in a piece of jewelry around a child’s neck. But so it was. “...So you’ll never have a reason to believe you’re all alone in the world,” the proud father told his little girl when he and mom presented the locket to her. Her seventh birthday was just at the beginning of the Great Darkening.

JUST THEN, OUT on the swing, as Marcie slowed down, Fletcher Melton jumps from his swing, runs up and snatches the locket from her neck.

“Hey!” she yells, jumping off the swing to chase him. “Come back here! That’s mine!”

The bratty boy doesn’t stop. He runs and hid behind a pile of old abandoned cars.

“Don’t go off too far kids,” Marcie’s mom, who’d been busy the whole time, stirring a campfire and setting out utensils to eat from, had been keeping a watchful eye on them.

“But he’s got my locket!” Marcie complained.

Fletcher’s mother spoke up then. Fletc!” she called, “give the child back her necklace.” The two families were traveling together, the kids’ parents being great friends. The fathers had worked together at the lab. They’d heard that research was being done in Blacksburg at Virginia Tech -- “Research? What kind of research?” “Enough to give us a fighting chance at life” they were told—so the two families were making their way there on foot to learn as much about the progress being made, and to offer any help they could. The moms were the ones holding the families together. While the father’s and Fletcher’s teen siblings did the hunting and skinning of their daily catch, it was the moms’ task to unify and organize their camps—from meal preparations, to sleeping arrangements, to keeping the peace between the children. Fletcher’s mom had been busy folding clothes from a line they’d stung up for the wash. A creek near the playground provided fresh water for drinking and laundry. “Fletcher James Melton,” his mom said now with emphasis in her voice, “give Marcie back her locket!”

The boy stumbled slowly out of the shadows into the clearing, holding the locket in hand. He never really looked that closely at it before. It was completely fascinating. There on the black velvet is a pearl of liquid as shiny as smooth sliver but with a varying display of awesome hues of colors. At times it looked transparent; at times it looked translucent with colors and shapes--and his eyes glowed with wonderment. Fletcher was ten, too, but he’d never seen anything like this before. The orb seemed almost alive. Like it was some kind of animal shaped like a drop of water.

But what he didn’t know was that the droplet was truly indeed an entire universe—in miniature form.

There in the droplet, time moves at an astonishingly fast rate of speed. What might be minutes of time here, could pass as eons of time there. A trillion, no, a multitude of trillions of suns lived in that tiny bead of mercury. And one planet, circling a medium sized yellow sun, a star, with seven other known planets circling with it, was Earth. And this third planet from the sun was experiencing similar circumstances as Marcie’s planet. There in fact, the entire miniature universe in the locket was experiencing a complete upheaval.

Fletcher was laughing and shaking the locket like it was a baby’s rattle.

On Earth, mountains were displaced. Volcanoes began erupting. Oceans swelled. Mudslides ran down into villages and sinkholes swallowed up entire neighborhoods. Airplanes fell from the sky, crashing into apartment buildings and amusement parks; and bridges, swaying in the strange storm of wind and motion, began to crumble--the entire universe being disrupted, upset, thrown off-kilter.

Panic was everywhere. In almost every city of the world, flood waters run rampant down streets like rivers.

The Earth was a wreck.

“Hey, stop that!” Marcie says to Fletcher, running up to him, reaching for the locket. But the boy taunts her, avoiding her attempts to grab it, and he shakes it more.

“Look here, girlie—your universe turning to mush!”—and he violently shakes it again.

“STOP IT!”

There in the locket, the universe bends and expands. Planets are thrown into disarray, supernovas explode, moons crash into planets, worlds collide.

And on Earth, Doomsday has come. The air is thick with molten debris, lava falling from the sky; tornados ripping across the continents, windstorms and lightning threatening all life--the world stopping on its axis--hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and tsunamis, earthquakes attacking from the seas-- and in the boy’s hands, he keeps shaking the locket.

“I said give it to me!” Marcie yells, but the boy, still shaking it, turns to run and runs headlong into his own father’s stomach. Just returning with Marcie’s father, and Fletcher’s older brother and sister, they’d made good on their hunting today, toting dinner—a brown squirrel, two gray rats and a skinny cat.

“Whoa, there,” says the big man. Jeremy Melton is a kind father, and you can hear it in his voice, but when it comes to disciplining this spoiled son of his, he takes on a different tone. “What’s going on here?”

“He’s got my locket!” Marcie says.

“She gave it to me.”

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

“Well, if the young lady says she didn’t give the locket to you, then return it to her now.”

Fletcher hesitates.

“NOW!” says the father with seriousness in his voice.

Fletcher, turning toward Marcie, pops the lid to the locket open and the tiny round orb of universe slides out to his index finger. Every eye watch as he balances the tiny translucent cosmos on the tip of that finger. His red hair blows gently in the breeze. A thin smile creeps across the boy’s lips. There’s a mischievous fire in his green eyes. And slowly he rolls the finger over, so that now the universe is hanging on, upside-down—with nothing beneath it, nothing to cling to except the finger.

To drop, to let it fall, would be instant death for it and all its worlds.

For a long moment, the universe rest at the tip of the boy’s finger, not dropping. Suspended, as it were, in time.

Daylight can be seen through the bubble.

Then, without ceremony, it drops.

And both Marcie and her dad spring forward to catch it.

If you like this story, please feel welcome to send tips and hearts and please pass it on. Each of us need encouragement. I hope by some way I encouraged you to please strive for your dreams. Don't ever give up. Thank you for helping me reach mine. (Also, much thanks to the Vocal Team for extending the Doomsday Diary Challenge due to technical errors with the system: this story was written in haste a few hours before the challenge was scheduled to end--and at the last minute was trying to send it when the system crashed. Thx VT for the extension, otherwise, without it this story might not have been possible.)