The Death of Harris Phillip

Flames are falling onto the city across the river from where Harris Phillip stands. He stares, mouth open, as the Chrysler building crashes to the ground and the screams of Detroit citizens echo from the sweeping black water between them. Harris’ tiny white dog whines at his side. Not knowing what to do, he fumbles with his phone and dials 9-1-1. The line is busy.

He takes a few steps to the side of his house and peers around the brick siding into the street. A single mom stands on her lawn, tears dripping from her chin, with a pajama-clad toddler clinging to her shirt. Before he can signal to her, she grips onto her son and bolts back into her house. Other neighbours are opening their blinds and turning on lights. He hears a truck start up in the driveway next door as the street gets peculiarly bright. Another car speeds past his house, almost clipping the truck as it backs up.

Harris isn’t a dramatic man. He meanders contently through life and, until tonight, he believed that’s how his retirement would go. Now, he is disappointed to learn that his plans have been drastically altered, because now he must run from certain death. His terrier, Sammy. in one arm as the other flails helplessly at his side. The flab that has built up on his chest, where muscle used to be, bounces up and down under a button up shirt and Fair Isle sweater vest. It is not a graceful sight, watching Harris Phillip run. Mercifully, for him, no one seems to be paying attention to his running. They are all caught up in their own certain deaths and have now started to do the exact opposite of what they were taught to do in an emergency—panic.

Police sirens sound from the main road, of which there is only one in Stonebrooke. Harris is comforted by them for exactly 7.6 seconds. After 7.6 seconds pass, a very large and very hot ball, presumably made of some sort of stone, explodes in the middle of town. Harris, and everybody else, has only one goal in mind, and that is to get out of the way of the large, fiery rocks.

It is astonishing to Harris how well his legs are functioning under the circumstances. They have been running, yes, running, for minutes now without ceasing. A personal best and also a minor miracle for Harris, whose usual form of exercise is pressing the “next episode” button. Sammy’s head bounces with alarming elasticity – up, down, right left, and occasionally in directions not formally recognized by physics – as Harris maneuvers between people and fireswept buildings. The screams of his neighbours and loud crashes from the flaming boulders propel him forward.

At last, Harris has reached the edge of town. Lungs ablaze, ribs loose and rattling like poorly maintained shelving. He pushes on through a shoulder-height corn field until he arrives at precipice of a small forest. The forest, quiet and dark, is a satisfactory place to hide from the apocalypse. Here, Harris can catch his breath and release Sammy from the tomb of his sweaty armpit. Harris observes that the danger appears to remain within the limits of town, where most buildings are now dilapidated and smoldering. The screams have been put out by the fire. He sits on his knees in the moist dirt and drags his sweaty palms down his face. Many questions plague Harris’ mind: is the world ending? Should he have purchased the survival kit he saw on TV? Was it his house that has just exploded?

Unfairly, he has had almost no time to process all of this and is now noticing something peculiar: a rustling in the corn field. Something (or things) is running in his direction, directly at him, in fact. In a jolt of terror Harris’ instinct is to jump up and throw his fists into the air, knowing full-well his fists are inferior forms of protection. When the rustling stops everything falls silent. A beam of moonlight reflects from a pair of eyes a few feet from where Harris is standing. His fists hang aimlessly in the air. Another set of eyes has appeared, and another. Now Harris is surrounded by all sorts of eyes that belong to all sorts of animals; a family of wild turkeys, a smattering of Eastern Cottontails, one young buck, the Jackson’s golden retriever, a scrawny coyote, the orange tabby cat he sometimes feeds, and, from above, a barn owl. A Canadian Goose honks somewhere in the distance. Sammy hides instinctively behind Harris’ pant leg. Harris assumes the animals are running towards the forest for sanctuary, much like he has—but, before he can sigh in relief or question why they’ve stopped running, a bolt of lightning cracks through Harris Phillip’s skull. Harris Phillip is dead. His body, rigid and splayed across the ground, points towards the asteroid-lit sky where the rest of him is dispersing. Whatever is left of him now knows things the living Harris would have never consciously known. The clusters of particles that are quickly escaping from his body come to a simple conclusion: individuality was a convenient illusion. They are learning, or relearning, upon exiting that their role is a complex, interdependent system of matter and decay. One particle notes, with mild remorse, we’ve made a spectacular mess of things. Another logs, cycle complete. A dispersed consortium of them observes the animals—who, unlike humans, retain the ability to perceive unfiltered reality—and notes with faint surprise that they seem aware of the shift. The last fragments of Harris linger for a moment longer than strictly necessary, swept up in the revelations they cannot now apply.

Sammy, still confined to his harness, wriggles free and gives one final lick to his dearly departed human. In a few hours he will be eaten by the coyote.