Son Of Man

“Of course it all ends with the sun,” she said.

The hem of her dress snagged on a fallen tree branch and she tugged it free without breaking stride. She spoke to the air in front of her.

“Why wouldn’t it? Everything started with the sun...”

“What?” I said, ducking downed power lines with an extra pair of shoes in my hand, trying to catch up. “That doesn’t mean that YOU need to end with the sun. People are staying in, you know...it’s too strong during the day...”

“Why are you out, then?” she asked, with a quick glance back over her shoulder.

“Because I saw an absolute loon walk by my house barefoot, in full sunlight, heading uphill of all things! The trees stop soon you know, there’s no protection at all up there.”

I crunched up beside her over broken glass and shoved the shoes under her hand. She stopped and turned towards me, a red heart-shaped locket swinging around and coming to a rest in the delta of her bosom.

“At least take these,” I said, squinting and shading my eyes. “I’d like to go back home.”

She looked down at the shoes quizzically like I was handing her a fistful of money, or something equally useless.

“I’d prefer to be on the ground,” she said, staring at me with her eyes wide open before turning back towards the road. “I’m safer that way.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I shouted, freezing as she glared back at me like a mother would glare at a petulant child. My mouth hung open. She didn’t say anything, but instead walked over to a gap in the trees and pointed towards the city skyline below.

The evening storms had rolled in, with cumulonimbus towering over the skyscrapers. She pointed out towards the suburbs, where the land was scarred from lightning strikes. The evening’s bolts had begun to fall there, and black smoke rose up to feed the clouds. Then, she drew her finger slowly towards downtown, where the towers reached their yearning lightning rods up towards heaven. The strikes flashed there too, but those towers took the charge and gave it back to the earth. Nothing burned there.

She looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

“That’s specious reasoning…” I said uselessly.

She turned back onto what used to be the road to the summit. People had gone up there to escape the fires at first, but since then most everybody was back down in the city, fighting over scraps.

“Where are you even going?!” I asked helplessly as she walked away.

“Forward…” she said, taking a long pause. It seemed as if she was thinking about it for the first time, just then. “...And upward, it seems.”

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

A shower of sparks burst from a transformer overhead. As they fell, they swirled around her in what must have been a lucky zephyr of wind. I was unlucky, and the scintillas blew back at me and burned little holes in my jacket. I patted them out frantically with my left hand.

In my right hand I still held my wife’s old shoes.

They hadn’t been worn in a while.

My wife disappeared during the first shock wave.

I kept her things in case she ever returned. It had been months. The house was quiet. I stayed there because it was the only place she could find me if she was still alive. Day times were spent in the basement, usually. At night I kept watch.

The woman disappeared around the bend. I stashed the shoes under an abandoned car and jogged to catch up. I think I was doing it more for me than for her. It had been a while since I had seen a human who wasn’t a threat, and her company felt like something familiar.

As I rounded the corner I caught sight of her, emerging from the trees into the bright light on the summit. She shook out her hair. I pulled my sleeves down and popped the collar of my jacket up over my neck. Sunglasses on. I wished I had a hat.

“Do you mind if I join you?” I shouted, wincing and slouching under the light. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”

She looked back with a sardonic smile. With carefree steps, she picked a spot in the grass overlooking the city. She sat in the sun beside a patch of shade cast from the treeline and motioned towards it.

“Sit there if you want to stay safe so badly,” she said.

“You’re not wearing enough to be in the full light,” I said as I sat down.

“You’re lucky I’m wearing anything at all,” she said, and laughed a little. “If you weren’t following me I’d have left my clothes behind in a heap already.”

“You’re self-destructive,” I said, trying not to seem like I was staring at her chest as the evening sun glinted off her locket. It looked more yellow-orange in the full light, shining with gradients.

She drew a deep breath as she looked out over the burning city. With a slow exhale a smile crept over the corners of her mouth. I shifted around and made sure no one had followed us.

“I love it up here! It’s a beautiful evening!” she said with her eyes lit up.

“You’re psychotic,” I said flatly.

Her smile curled larger and burst with teeth.

“And another thing,” I said, getting frustrated. “Why is that locket green now? Wasn’t it red? Are you playing some kind of trick on me? This is what I mean when I say the sun’s too strong to go out in. I feel like I’m losing my mind…”

Her hand shot to her heart and enclosed the locket. I watched all the tiny hairs on her face ripple in the sunlight as she pursed her lips.

“Well?” I said.

“It’s…” her voice trailed off. She continued hesitantly, “It's electrochromatic...or magnetochromatic...I can’t remember the term for it. It’s supposed to change colour with your body’s electromagnetic field…I kept it from before.”

“That word…” I said, looking out at the sky to think. “Where have I heard that before?”

From the corner of my eye I could see her stiffen and brace.

“AHA!” I said, and her spine straightened. “The Electrochromes! That’s it! That was the name of that wacky doomsday cult.” I laughed to myself, thinking of the news stories from back when there were news stories. “Don’t tell me…”

She clutched her locket and looked away.

“It wasn’t a cult,” she said. “And what’s so wacky about doomsday anyway?” She threw her arm outward to encompass the whole charred view.

“I’ll give you that much,” I said. “But look, my wife’s friend took her to those meetings. I heard what went on. Sounded like a bunch of pseudoscience to me.”

“If you don’t want to hear it then that’s fine,” she said.

I sat for a while, shading my eyes. The angry sun descended towards black and flashing clouds over the city. It looked like it was fixing to fall for good.

“Okay, try me,” I said, to keep the conversation going. Her lower lip fluttered in a way that I knew, and I felt something soften inside. “...I want to communicate.”

She let her hand fall. Aqua now, the green shifting to blue in waves.

“Well, it’s not that complicated. Our brains have electromagnetic fields, and so do our hearts. We know that, I mean, that’s science, right?”

I bit my tongue and nodded.

“So the earth and the sun have those fields too, and on and on outwards. And if you get your own field in order, then you can join theirs. Brain joins heart joins earth joins sun joins others.”

“...Uh-huh...and the locket?”

“It’s sort of like a fancy mood ring, I guess. It lets you know where you’re at, so you can make sure you’re tuned in. Plus I think it’s already tuned itself, kind of like a little resonator.”

“Okay, okay, so what happens when you’re tuned in?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Too much for a sleepyhead like me to handle, eh? All right, I’ll ask a simpler question then. What’s inside the locket?”

“You can have it when I’m done with it. You’ll see for yourself. It’s kind of a seeing rather than a telling thing anyway.”

“That’s…” I paused, wondering what she meant by that, “...that’s sweet of you. Do you need a place to stay until then?”

“I’m in a place...” she said absently.

BOOOOOOOOOOOM

Rivulets of little rocks flowed by as the ground shook beneath us. It wasn’t the first of these shake-ups, but the rending sound from deep within the earth never got any easier to hear.

“Looks like a big one tonight,” she said, pointing towards the sun. “We’ll have a good view up here.”

With dread I watched as the shock wave arrived. The spiked halo grew out from our setting sun with an almost audible crackle. Someone told me it always has sixty-four points. I’d never checked, because I’d gone to the basement every time. Impacts were never good news.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked, laying back splayed in the grass.

“Terrible, I’d say.”

“All angels are terrible,” she said. “Someone said that.”

I sighed and tried to see the upside as the sun dipped into the black clouds. Night dropped like a sheet over us, leaving only the green snaking tentacles of the aurora reaching out from the horizon.

“Take a load off,” she said up to the open sky. “You’re already up here.”

She had a point. At least I didn’t need to worry about something falling on me. I laid back and looked over at her, seeing a faint halo of indigo over her chest.

“It’s nice with your eyes closed, too,” she said with a slight smile, catching me looking at her.

I still kept my eyes open as the night deepened, to be safe. The green ribbons and curtains fluttered and snapped above. She was right, although I didn’t say it. If I forgot about everything, the world, myself and my probably imminent death included, it really was beautiful.

***

My eyes must have closed, because things make less sense after that. The electric green snakes swirled down from the sky. I tried to move my head to watch, but my neck was stiffened. Any time I managed to look straight into the lights, my mind went blank. They poked and prodded around my body. A buzzing sound. Blooming. Was it pain? Was I mistaken? A flash like lightning overhead, and my irises snapped shut behind my eyelids.

I jolted awake and sat bolt upright. It was quiet, and dark except for the green swaths above, now just remote wonders again. I had been dreaming.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw bright violet in the grass beside me. I looked over to see her sleeping form, but saw something else instead.

A dress laid empty in the grass, fluttering softly in the night breeze. A heart-shaped locket rested on top.

“Humph,” I grunted to myself, looking around. She must have gone for that naked frolic after all, I thought. Just like an Electrochrome. I grabbed her dress and bundled it up for a pillow, thinking I’d hold onto it until she returned.

The necklace...I put it on.

Just for fun.

It rested lightly on a scaly rash that had appeared on my chest. I resolved to examine that in the morning as I laid back down. The smell of her dress reminded me of the pillow on my wife’s side of the bed, at least way back when. It had been smelling like me for months now. Or, rather, smelling like nothing.

My eyes closed.

***

Tunnel. Vertigo. Light speed. Falling, but falling forward? And upward, it seems?

***

In the morning, I rose with the sun.

-Adam K. Admon

July 23