Small Circles at the End of the World (TK Craft - New Orleans, LA)

           

             Everything smelt like ash around us, but I couldn’t look away from his face. I turned my head as far around as it could go as he danced around me.

            “You don’t have to follow me with your head, silly.” He said, summoning just a trace of laughter into his voice.

            A smile crossed my face, “But I want to look at you.”

            A grin spread across his face. His hand pressed gently on the joystick continuing the slow circle around me. Outside of the circle he traced, another circle was closing in on us. We’d been running for so long that it felt good to stop.

            “I want to be by the water.” He said last night, out of nowhere. We hadn’t seen anyone else in days, we wondered if we were the last two men on Earth. “If we have to give up, I want to see the river one last time.”

            We decided to go back to the last good memory we had before all this started. To our spot by the river, where the row of industrial buildings ends and the trees start to grow again. For the first time, we were able to load the van up without having to dodge the figures. It felt like the calamity was giving us this one last moment.

            We sat on the shore for as long as we were allowed. I rested my head in his lap and stared out into the water until the shadows came and consumed the horizon.

            “I just need to move.” He said, lifting my head off his lap and sitting up on his knees. He reached for his chair and pulled himself up. It’s funny how I used to insist on helping him up at the beginning. He was never mad at me, but I could see the small crease of annoyance at the corner of his eyes. By now we’d found an easy rhythm, I knew when to help and when to let him be.

            Situated on his chair, he leaned forward and pressed his palm against my cheek. I had been holding in my emotions for maybe days now. He moved his fingers up and down my face as the heat began to rise around us. I let myself cry one last time, sobbing into his hand. When I finished, he let go of my face and kissed me softly on the lips. Then he started his slow circles around me. He knew when to help me and when to let me be.  

            The shadows and heat continued their advance, but if I just focused on his face then the world didn’t seem so wrong. We knew the fire would reach us eventually, that we’d be swallowed up by the rage of the world. But for now, I looked at the light playing across his face. I could focus on the bright spots in his eyes. His constant motion was enough to blur the slow growing chaos around us. I always thought the end of everything would be louder, like a roar in my ears- instead the only noise was the soft whir of his chair. The screams and cries stopped long ago.

            Between the blurs of his movement I could see a figure emerge from a cloud of dust. I didn’t focus on them, there was no point. I only wanted to memorize the forms of his body. A beep broke through the mostly quiet air. My whole buddy jumped at the sudden noise. The mechanized sound was so much more frightening than the avatars of destruction moving towards us. My body had stopped responding to their appearances. Until then I thought I had been sapped of every drop of fear and adrenaline my glands can pump out. But that beep proved there was still something more for my body to fear.

            “Batteries are almost dead again.” He says, ceasing his movement.

            “Shit. I think I left the extra pack in the van.” I stood up suddenly. As if I could just walk past the figures and retrieve it. He caught my eye and smiled at me sadly.

            “I think this is it.” He said. How is he still smiling in the middle of this?

            I couldn’t respond to him; my body suddenly felt weak. Is this really the end for us? There were so many years where I sat alone on my couch, a different darkness crept up on me in those days. I finally found him and then the world had to go and fucking end?

            “Just come sit with me.” He said.

            There were two figures then, moving behind him. They moved towards us so slowly, their forms flickering in and out of existence like the fireflies that used to dot the summer skies. Their pace was glacial, wisps of ash and shadow that could almost be still.. They never seemed to have a sense of urgency. As if they knew they’d cover everything eventually. They knew the world was theirs.

I walked over to him and climbed onto his lap. From the outside I always worried how silly this looked. Me, twice his height, curled up into the cramped lap of his motorized chair. But there’s no one left to gawk at us now. No one left to stare at us wide eyed in wonder. The figures did not care, did not even look at us.

            He pressed me close to his chest. We closed our eyes. Our breathing synced together. After years of bad dates, and ugly relationships I used to think I was meant to die alone. But as the clouds of shadow and fire engulf us, I realized that we’d somehow beaten the odds. We’d broken some curse of loneliness that the world had placed on us..

 

More Figures now, flickering in from a ring of fire. The figures closed in a small circle around us. I took in every breath of the man beneath me, letting the smell of his skin consume my lungs. His scent masked the smells of our new world-burnt flesh and hair-that I’d never quite gotten used to.  Fire licked at our skin, but I focused on the feeling of his hands around my body. There was a distant scream as the firefly darkness covered everything. I closed my eyes and focused hard. The last thing I heard was a final whir of his dying chair, and a peaceful sigh as the world consumed us both.