Preface: this is a hilariously old and emo story I wrote in High School after a haunting image popped into my brain of a ghost of a man wandering an apocalyptic wasteland with nothing but cockroaches and ash to keep him company. So, yeah, emo.And it totally would have been cooler as a painting. Maybe I will just do that someday.
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Will Stoker watched the world end from an old spaceport lounge overlooking the low rolling plains and stagnant metropolis to the east. Alone, hand pressed against cloudy dirt-specked glass, he watched a tidal wave, a wall of flame, overtake the peacefully empty landscape. Green and blue sky turned black and red, clouds vaporized, and the maw of the fire swallowed the city, hungrily devouring all remnants of life in its path. Stoker’s shaking hand stuck to the window with cold sweat, his heart beat against his chest as though fighting to be free of his ribcage, and in his panicking mind ricocheted a single thought.
She left me here to die…
And die he did, leaning against a filthy window amidst gaudy decorated chairs, strewn about in the aftermath of a mad rush for an escape from the doomed planet. He died with a shattered heart and splintered soul. The fire engulfed him, within a fraction of a second melting and evaporating the glass, searing the skin and flesh from Stoker’s bones in an agonizing split second, shredding and eradicating his physical self before charring him to dust.
The inferno passed, revealing a sea of ash and molten rock, skeletons of buildings and a smoke-filled sky that drowned the newly risen sun in a miasma of whirling gray. Tempestuous winds picked up the dust of Stoker’s body and they were mingled with the dust of the burning planet. After a time the winds died down, and through the haze wandered a lone soul.
He left no footprints on the charred ground; he inhaled none of the settling earth. He strode through chaos without purpose; he walked among the ruins of his world without a care, his glazed eyes gazing unfocused and unseeing into the distance. And still the same thought caromed in his mind.
She left me here to die…
But eventually the dust settled, the sky cleared, the land of waste and rubble flourished with creatures that reveled in the destruction. The multiplied, spread quickly and grew beyond the size of their scuttling ancestors, and when they died they left shriveled segmented shells. They killed and devoured each other; they were their own predators and their own prey. The once familiar world that Will meandered became overrun with monsters that seemed alien, that made the planet even more not his own, and that cared not for the sun but for the dust and the darkness.
Humankind returned to the land that they had abandoned with the passage of time. Like shooting stars, like meteors they fell through the atmosphere to land in the desolation of their once beloved cities. By then, those who were of youth when they fled now were blue-haired and wrinkled, and the dusty, hazed memories of their once glorious planet served only to fill their weary eyes with tears. It was nearly the season of the Pleiades when she returned.
When he’d begun to see the starships, streaks of orange heading toward old remnants of ports and towns, he had been roaming in a vast somewhere, far from the land he’d once lived. At first he had thought the ephemeral veins of brightness were just meteorites, space-debris flashing through the atmosphere unwished upon and insignificant in one final light show before perishing into tiny particles, but then he’d seen one land, a sleek craft far beyond the technology that had died, it seemed, along with himself. The people that exited the chrome ship, wearing masks of oxygen in the changed air, were generally old, old enough to have seen the glory of the now desert planet, and the notion stampeded through Will’s mind that—maybe—she would come Home too, if these that landed were once inhabitants, and not descendants.
So he flew on the winds, his incorporeal particles mingling with the atoms of the air, back to the place of his death. With outwardly stolid but soulfully anxious anticipation he waited, hoping that she would return to the port of old, hoping that she would return at all. He took no note of time, of how long he waited, because time had long since ceased to hold importance for Will. He did not count the weeks, the months, but instead remembered times of the Past, his Past, the days they fought, that they loved, the weeks they spent apart from one another, the months they had lived together, planned for the future that was never to be. For she hadn’t been aware of the fact that the end of the world was approaching, and he had taken for granted her love and devotion. Neither had thought that anything would, could, fundamentally change, evolve, erode.
She had grown old and frail, like a windblown skeleton of a tree, white and gnarled, and she ambled with the aid of a metal cane. The ship she traveled in landed at the remnants of the old spaceport. The building, what had survived the apocalyptic event and the decades that followed, was crumbled into the twisted charred crucifixes of support beams, and when she shuffled slowly through it she recalled, like an old film playing before her eyes, the way it had once looked when he had taken her on trips, or came to meet her when she returned from faraway worlds, the way the Past was. She had almost expected him to be there, arms outstretched, smiling. But she didn’t see him standing there, because she had left him there all those years ago, and like the memories etched in her mind he was fading until all she could recall of him was a vague shadow.
Will found himself standing there, unable to move, staring at the now wrinkled hag that had once been the love of his Life. He stood there as the remnants of Earth culture passed through him, unseeing, unfeeling, unknowing. He stood there as she hobbled over to the frame of the window that had bordered his death and gazed out over the same expanse of land he had. But when the first tear fell down her cheek he was there, at her side, to catch it. They stood together as one, one dream, one life, one memory of what they had once dreamt and lived.
“Grandma!” squealed a young girl as she flew into the drooping arms of Will’s love, shattering his hopes. She has children. She found someone else. She moved on. She forgot about me.
She set the girl on the ground and whispered with a scratchy voice, “go fetch your father, dear, run along now.”
A little while later a middle-aged man, looking older than even Will, but with the same blue eyes and unruly light hair he remembered seeing in the mirror everyday for all his Life, approached her. She looked at him sadly and told him softly, “This was where we lived, your father and I, down in that city. He probably died there. Younger than you are now. He never…he never even knew about you, but he would be so proud of you….”
The insubstantial man found his knees were weak and collapsed onto them in the dust, not disturbing a thing. He watched with forlorn tears in his eyes and eternity in his soul, as the family he should have grown old with stood in the old spaceport, gazing out over the stagnant ghost of a city, listening to her reminisce about that which had shaped their lives until the end of the world tore it away with flame.
This time, as Will Stoker’s world ended, he left not dust on the wind but aspiration for life in the hearts of the family he left behind for death.
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