Locket

"I think I'm done," Elle said suddenly, and sat down on the ground. Ash puffed up around her in a weak little cloud as she did so.

The ash that sifted down constantly from the sky these days looked, moved and even sounded like snow, but it left greasy trails on your bare skin. It had transformed the surrounding landscape into a study of gray on gray.

Elle and I had grown up together. That's a short phrase, and one that often gets used lightly, but it was true in our case. We had lived next door to one another, our yards separated by only the most modest of hedges.

When I had been seven and she six, we had commandeered a pair of her mother's scissors and cut each other's hair. Being seven and six, we had not done a good job, and both our moms had been mortified, but they hadn't grounded us from seeing each other. They knew best friends when they saw them.

We had gone to the same schools, known all the same people and had even roomed together during our first year of college. The latter had felt like it was partly out of our deep friendship, and partly for defense against a strange, new world.

Then the Event had happened, and the world stopped being strange and new and started being over.

The meteorite that killed off the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about six and a half miles across. The one that's killed off us was definitively measured at ten miles across at its widest point. Humanity had had a year to watch it coming, on a direct collision course with Earth, but had been helpless to do anything about it.

In the movies, a heroic team of astronauts is sent up on an intercept course to blow up the planet-killer. If nothing else, missiles are used at the last moment to fragment it into smaller pieces that harmlessly pass the earth by.

Reality often does not imitate art. It didn't in the case of Impactor BW-902973, a city-sized hunk of rock and space metal that slammed into Australia with the precision of a pool shark sinking the eight ball in the corner pocket.

Everything at ground zero had been vaporized. The rest of that hemisphere had been hit first with the biggest shock wave in history, then the tallest wave of water the world had ever seen.

The rest of the planet got its dice royally rattled and took a hell of a soaking of its own, but there were survivors. Not many, but some. Elle and I had clung to one another in the days after the meteorite's impact and cried like little children. There were plenty of tears to be shed, enough for a whole world.

The ash got into everything. Anything that used a filtration system went dead within days. The air went bad inside buildings and temperature soared, thanks to the greenhouse effect. To go outside was to submit yourself to a quicker death, though, sort of like coal miner's lung in fast forward.

So we stayed inside until our food and water ran out. Then there was nothing else to do but cover our mouths and noses and eyes and go out looking for more.

There wasn't much to be found. Gradually, we became aware that the city in which we were tenuously clinging to our existence was exhausted of supplies. That meant we had to strike out for parts unknown and hope for the best.

We had been on the road for three days -- walking of course, since cars wouldn't run any more -- when Elle made her declaration and sat down in the middle of the highway.

"Come on," I tried, kneeling and giving her a cajoling shake around her thin shoulders. I didn't shake her too hard. I thought she might just snap if I did. Neither one of us had eaten since we had left the city.

"It's just another couple of miles," I continue. "You can make it."

I can't see mouth through the sooty bandanna covering her lower face or her eyes through the goggles above, but she sounded like she might be smiling sadly.

"That's what you said a couple of miles ago," she informs me. "I don't think either thing is going to pan out. Not for me."

"Don't be a quitter," I reply. "Get up. We have to keep moving."

She responded with a series of racking coughs. It chilled me every time that happened, since I had seen what that signified dozens of times before. I knew that Elle wasn't going to be coming with me to the next city.

"Dammit, Elle," I insisted. "Get up. Please."

Instead, she lowered her head and reached behind her neck. As she did so, the heart-shaped locket she wore swung in the air below her chin. Her ash-streaked fingers fumbled with the clasp.

A single tear dropped from her eye, striking the locket with the one-in-a-billion precision of a meteorite striking a particular planet and dooming every single thing living on its surface.

The tear was wicked up into the intricate scrollwork of the locket.

She succeeded in undoing the clasp and handed the locket over to me.

"Open it," she instructed.

I attempted to do so with a thumbnail, my fingers slipping on the residue left by her tear.

Finally, I got it open and looked inside. On either side of the tiny hinge was a heart-shaped window, meant to hold a picture. I squinted through my goggles at the tiny image within. It was a picture of me, cut out from a larger color photo.

"Remember that day?" she asked, her voice hoarse from coughing. "I know it's hard to tell from something so small, but --"

"I remember," I said, trying to keep my voice steady and not doing a good job.

"It's my favorite picture of you," she went on. "Because you look so happy. I'd give anything to be able to see you that happy again. Even for just a minute."

"Elle," I said, but couldn't continue. The split heart in the palm of my hand mirrored the split feeling deep in my chest.

"I love you," she replied. She has her bandanna pulled down, and she is smiling and it's beautiful and sad and final. "I've always loved you."

I nodded, my lower lip trembling. I didn't know how much longer I was going to be able to keep it together.

"You go on," she said.

I pulled my own bandanna down. Both of our faces underneath were, at least for this brief time, as clean and as pure as if none of this was happening. It was like two tiny flecks of springtime in this unbroken, hopeless gray landscape.

"I love you, too," I said, and kissed her softly. More tears fell from her eyes, mingling with my own as I kissed her for the first and last time in our lives.

"Go," she said when we were done.

I went.

She remained behind, sitting there. I didn't -- couldn't -- look back. Instead, I slipped the chain of the locket around my own neck. It took a while. My hands were shaking.

I walked along with the suspicion that I was now headed for nothing. My tears rolled down my cheeks, which I had neglected to cover again, and dropped down to my chest.

The locket there continued to wick up the tears. I imagined them working their way into the locket itself, wetting the picture of me, smiling as I never would again. I had already cried tears for the rest of the world. Now all of my tears were for my world, my little corner of it, for the chance I had been given here at the end of it.

I walked on into the gray, with my locket full of tears.