Fiction logo

PAEAN

You end everything that has ever been beautiful

By Kevin RollyPublished 3 years ago Updated 4 months ago 10 min read
16
THE EVENT by Kevin Rolly (Author)

The last of the funerals was now a year gone and diminishing into the cataracts of memory. Jason and his son were the last and there would be no others. A jagged pyre of dry shattered wood waits by their white swing set which had grown sullen with rust for there were no more children to come after him. I had broken down the fence, the dead spruce, pale chaparral and even the peeling dog house they left long after the animal had refused to return. But there was still not enough wood for this.

Jason was the best man at my wedding in the days when everything held promise, when the earth in her eternal clockwork set winter to green into spring and our futures were canopies of hope. Children laughed in their orbits and eternity yet sang in our vows. When her eyes still sparked with longing from across our modest dinner table set with plastic cups. Prosaic, mundane and transcendent. It was in the days before the dissolutions, incremental and pernicious, whose dark provenance was rooted in the thieving notion that there was a more to be had, burned away everything that I had promised. Soft betrayals with selfish illusions with other’s names secretly whispered in velvet bars, motels with dying neon signs and then screamed in divorce courts. I am sorry, Rachel.

This was long before the great silence, before the earth in her betrayal and grief, savagely abandoned us to ourselves. Like a creature in shock, drawing all life back into itself and with it every creation man had set his hand to. No more were distant voices. Phones, the internet pulling apart like broken strings. Radios beckoned but the sky would no longer reply. What was real became only what was immediate and confined by the radius of sight, of what could be held, breathed upon, all things once intimately known dimmed in a long divorce from their origins, their contexts and contingent now upon grey and shifting memory. The sky exhaled its acrid black vomitings of drench and the metallic wind heaved with ashes from beyond the terminations of the horizons while the cruel heat pinched the birds from the very air to plunge them in descending, screeching choruses, spiraling them downwards in a cloud of indiscriminate arcs to carpet the baking grey earth in a shroud of spastic black wings appearing to beseech the very heavens they were cast from till the flutterings weakened over the hours and finally grew still and silenced.

And in time all things became still and the land was scattered with the leavings of once was. I am the last person I have seen.

I place the boy on the pyre. Desiccated into a long husk, his delicate hands curled wrist down and held against his mouth. His grey fingers indiscriminately pointing sloped to his T-shirt bearing his favorite superhero now long stained by decomposition. I tried to place his hand in his father’s but it wouldn’t move without fear of me breaking him. He must have died months before Jason. The dead express only one scent which clings oily in the back of my senses and whose familiarity had become incessant for there were no more roses.

I slip the photo of us from college dorm into his fingers almost hoping some reflex of muscle would grasp it. But I owed him this at least. After everything.

Gasoline was thankfully abundant and I set the trail ten feet out. The flame wicked hungrily forward crackling the dead grass till the entire fecund heap detonated in a mushroom of flame and sparked alight the overhead branches which I had not bothered to consider. I stared blankly upwards. They weren’t going out. The flames began to crawl popping down the dead limbs. I looked about the expanse and all before me was tinder dried forest across the entire valley. Homes, barns, fields. As far as the horizons which remained committed to silence. I’m sorry, Jason. I guess you should know me by now. I always muck things up in the end.

I should have gone through the house before, but now I had little time. It was in the bedroom closet she said, hidden in a blue shoebox. Why she left it here I do not know. Perhaps to force this return in the hopes of some desultory reconciliation but now too late. Maybe even by days.

I knew where the bedroom was and the far closet still filled with her clothes left untouched like a kind of emotional ossuary. The chest was smooth and nondescript, the tiny latch giving only the childlike illusion of security. But now rancid smoke bittered the air and the floor grew suddenly hot. I threw the chest into my satchel and bolted past their bed, past the bay window. The entire yard was on fire. Rushing the stairs, family photos adorned the walls in a descending narrative of their history – Prom, first vacations, the wedding, the birth of their son. Looking behind me the kitchen was engulfed by thick sooted flames, the glass panes shattering across the tiled floor as the flowered wallpaper curled off in blackening strips. And in some impulse of propriety, I lock the door on the way out.

The jeep was a hundred yards out, gifted from my neighbor who was one of the first to die and loaded with the pilfered collections of the past year, amassed in a circuitous crisscrossing of the nation for a purpose I only vaguely sensed, but darkly understood now. They were the harvests from those once known to me, all now abandoned by death and richer than I in life. And all their possessions imbued with loss yet remain bound to me in the shackles of memory. Their existence a reminder before the world unwound. To just feel safe again if only to give them one final purpose.

I throw the satchel upon the passenger seat. And with this final cache was the time of my leaving.

In the rearview mirror the black smoke now occluded the sky in a quickening uproar and in an hour the neighborhood would be erased in an unyielding inferno along with the valley beyond. Screeching now through street signs and past shattered road lights, the wastrel streets blur in their scatterings of garbage and paper carried in swirling eddies of the hot wind. I speed and I speed for there was no more world that could command me to stop.

The greyscape of the shattered city skyline receding behind me in the measures of crossed bridges and vacant intersections each tolling behind me the last of man’s failed monuments till at last the still vestal land opened her palms to the naked desert and the final highway east as I let the empty static of the radio hiss for the entirety of the uncounted hours until the traces of man drew long between into the miles and then the many of miles till all vestiges of humanity expired from sight.

And upon those last paling highway remnants I set child hood photos in the frames of cracked milky windows and secret away old love letters into the last mailboxes and write psalms upon the warped floorboards of abandoned porches. The beginning of this last great dispossession beneath the thick grey blanket of the sky where the sun hung withdrawn and vague behind the curdled indifferent clouds as thick tires bore across pavements scarred by deep spiderweb cracks as if the earth took one last breath, splintered and exhaled her last.

And In the farthest land enshrouded by mountains, over washboard roads and unmarked turnoffs, I make my final stop. There will be no returning from here. It is Native Land and the petroglyphed monoliths with the extinguished tribe’s ancient prophesy thirst dry and skyward about me. And in the shadows of the high rocks I offload the highjacked stash. Tomorrow would be the last sunrise upon this dying earth.

I set out the generator and power cords, the stolen velvet chair, Christmas lights and placed a children’s table still scrawled with ‘Mommy’ in blue crayon. I nestle the Victrola beside me with the crate of albums along with the case of wine with names I cannot pronounce and each twice my age. I choose John Coltrane from the antique milkcrate and set the needle gently down. The final paean of the world. Out amongst the rocks I place the family projector with the film set in a perpetual loop. Flickering over the glyphs and portends, I watch my brother and I play on the shores of Ocean City.

Out in pebbled wash I dig a twenty-foot-wide Omega symbol two feet deep and place every journal I have ever written from first to last along its arc. I gently lay Rachel’s wedding dress in the center and draw the wedding ring from my finger and place it where I imagine her corsage once was and empty the entirety of the remaining gas into the trench. I take my grandfather’s sword, wrap my first concert T-shirt about its tip, fuel it and set the entire moat ablaze and retreat. And as the impenetrable night collapses forcing the hopeless sun into the pocket of the horizon, there are no longer stars and Heaven finally closes its last remaining eye over the dome of the earth.

I eat of caviar and salmon and pour rich wine into a plastic cup won at a local fair when I was ten. In my travels, the wine had grown rank and I pour it out into the dirt. But the scotch endured a century of wars only to find me.

In its swoon I watch as my journals shred and buckle in the blazing heat, my history drawn into the sky in invisible currents. Rachel’s dress crumples and retreats into itself as if somehow frightened and assaulted. And then the sadness. Aching and unshakable.

I take the maple box from my satchel and sit it upon my lap. And I hold it for hours. I hold it until the film has broken in the projector which jitters in a blank window upon the enduring stone.

Bonnie. Bonnie was her name. Jason’s wife who I seduced in the months after their child’s creation and led to the destruction of all things that mattered to all of us. Inside are the baubles of calculated sentiment – Ticket stubs in pairs, Hungarian Forints left from their honeymoon, a cheap locket vaguely in the shape of a heart, the clasp long worn out. Opening it, they both peer joyful and naïve from their respective sides, the images from high school before hope became a byword I ruined. The tiny note is wadded inside.

“You end everything that has ever been beautiful, Kyle.”

Yes. And now I have.

I have my uncle’s army jacket now and a pen. The rusted stains from blood that was not his and words no one will read.

Out in the wash the flames stuttering out in the shallows and her dress now withered into a molten strake whose blackened leavings scuttle across the flats from the shifting west wind that descends hot down the ravine. A horizon begins to congeal out of the blackness, sallow grey and baleful. Fumbling, I place her note into the now empty scotch bottle and set it decisively upon the earth. And stare for a long while. In the lost time of blanching minutes, the day is ashing in. I check my watch.

Thirteen minutes to go and the secret keepers watching from the borders of the sky will give up their last demands and claim me now to their own. Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.

Short Story
16

About the Creator

Kevin Rolly

Artist working in Los Angeles who creates images from photos, oil paint and gunpowder.

He is writing a novel about the suicide of his brother.

http://www.kevissimo.com/

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Kevissimo/

Reader insights

Outstanding

Excellent work. Looking forward to reading more!

Top insights

  1. Compelling and original writing

    Creative use of language & vocab

  2. Excellent storytelling

    Original narrative & well developed characters

  3. Expert insights and opinions

    Arguments were carefully researched and presented

  1. Eye opening

    Niche topic & fresh perspectives

  2. Heartfelt and relatable

    The story invoked strong personal emotions

  3. On-point and relevant

    Writing reflected the title & theme

Add your insights

Comments (2)

Sign in to comment
  • Sathishkumar S2 months ago

    nice story

  • This was a fantastic story!

Find us on social media

Miscellaneous links

  • Explore
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Support

© 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.