What came after the end

Like most normal people, I have been preoccupied, horrified, terrified, distressed, depressed by what is happening in this world of ours. The only one we have. I wrote this a couple of years ago. Time to share it.

What came after the end

Once, they said, the moon was round and glowed like a pale sun, casting soft grey shadows on the grass. Once, the moon was fat-bellied like a pregnant woman, and shone with the same splendour. Once the moon drew up the ocean tides, rolled waves up the strand to the dunes, then pulled them back to leave a mirror, bright as pewter. The moon was bright enough to hunt by, they said, silvery light carried on the wings of owls skimming low, glinting in the eyes of foxes and badgers. The moon sailed in ocean skies that reflected the ocean waters, guiding wanderers, calming and soothing after the ardent day sun. Stars were sprinkled like pebbles across the darkness, glittering with a fierce distant fire. Too distant to be more than decorative, a scattering of jewels, a mesh of light. That was then, long ago, in the times before.

Now, there is no grass, there are no tides, no seas.

Now the moon hangs by a thread, stubborn and obtuse, from the same wan star. She neither rises nor sets, grows neither fat nor thin. She no longer commands the tides and the cycles of the earth. The moon is a crescent, a bitten apple, broken and defiled by our constant warring.

But though the stars have drawn away and left the once blue planet to her solitary wanderings, the moon remains, obstinately clinging to an invisible thread. She hangs like a ragged target, pocked and splintered by shot, a living reproach.

When the last war fizzled out, the last warheads had exploded and made another grey desert where toxic winds blew and not even mutants dug for food, the children began to creep back from their underground warrens. The signal was barely perceptible, a mere feeling in their tripes, but now they gather to stand at the edge of the great gulf that was once an ocean and point at the battered sign in the sky that they know, though no one has ever told them, was Moon. And they know why.

Something draws them back to the dead ocean, at intervals that perhaps signify a time, though there is no more time. No sun rises, no moon sets, nothing changes, except the feeling that is growing deep down in their hearts, a restless anger that they have been deprived of something. They have never seen it, but in a deep place inside, its memory is locked, and they know the thing that has been stolen from them is all the beauty of the earth.

Dust settles, the winds blow elsewhere, and not just children make their way to the gulf of the dead ocean. Though there are no more missiles to be sent on their deadly, futile missions, no means of making more, neither the resources nor the installations, there are still soldiers. Unlike the children, nothing draws them with a primal urge. They arrive at the gulf after aimless wandering, their eyes still full of fiery streaks, comets of mass destruction, skies incandescent with promethean fire, their hearts bitter at the silence and emptiness.  Soldiers need no sophisticated weaponry to still call themselves soldiers. An iron bar will do, a piece of sharp-edged steel that can be held in the hand to slice and sever.

The soldiers in their tattered suits, their makeshift weapons strapped into makeshift belts, call themselves warriors. Their faces are sharp, suspicious, their ideas limited to what they can hold in their fists. There might have been women among them to begin with, drawn by the same mysterious call that gathered up the children, but the children see no women amid the ranks that appear at the gulf. They look at one another, knowing what that means. Sterility, the end of life, the redundancy of the female. The warriors will bring the end. They are the end. There will be nothing after them. The children hide, watch, wait for what will happen, and the anger that has grown inside finds a focus and becomes determination.

The warriors stand on the edge, that is no longer an edge, because there is nothing beyond it, nothing different, just lower, darker, perhaps deader. Who knows really? They know only that they lost something when the dark silence fell. Their raison d’être. The warriors stand on the edge and believe they have found it in the obstinately empty sky. They point at the broken moon, hanging from the star, the war-shattered paleness of her.

‘Still there!’ They rage, shrieking like berserkers, ‘Still defying logic when everything else has sunk into darkness!’

Just as they have a scapegoat, the warriors have a leader. Warriors always have a leader. This one hefts a spear fashioned from the entrails of a long-dead machine.

‘If we are all for the dark, we can put out this treacherous bitch first!’

In their burrows, the children huddle together, hunkered down, foreheads pressed to their knees. The smallest whimper, but the ones who have lived longest, whose eyes are dark as pits and wise as salmon, clench their jaws and listen. Their dark eyes glitter and not with tears. They listen to the hiss of spears, the slice of swords and the shrieks of anger rising to a frenzy. They hold their breath when, for an instant, silence falls. Then a great roar of triumph rolls through the warrens, rocking the children in its chaos.

Terrified, they clutch one another, but as quickly as it escalated, the wild frenzy at the edge of the gulf drops to a murmur of bewilderment, then swells into a moaning of despair. The dark-eyed boys and girls look at one another, and in the darkness, their teeth glint white as whale bone. Though the whales are all dead long ago, the hope in their bones has found a home.

They creep to the entrances of their burrows, the stirrings of a strange, fluttering thing in their chests, and their gaze rises above the weapon-waving, vociferating warrior-mass, to the sky, and the splintered, bitten piece of Moon. With their thrusting and slicing, the warriors have cut the slender thread that tied the moon to the dead sun, but she has not fallen as they hoped. They have not brought her down to crash in useless splinters on the dead flatness of no-life. They have cut the last of her bonds and let her go, free, a wounded swan, limping on bedraggled wings, but free.

Whale-bone teeth shine in the dark of burrows, and the children hug one another with a joy they never knew existed. It is the first thing to be reborn. After hope. Outside, the warriors shout themselves hoarse, anger turning to hatred. Even their eyes seem to glow red with the fire they have kindled within. 

‘What will they do now?’ one of the children asks.

The girls, especially the older, wiser girls, shiver. The boys clench small fists. They know, but they are afraid to say the words aloud, where the warriors will turn their passions next. Instead they offer a sort of comfort.

‘They have lost their scapegoat. All they have to fight now is themselves. And they will.’

The children retreat deep into the warrens that run sinuous as wormholes beneath the skin of the earth, taking their hope with them to keep it safe.

When the feeling, that is almost a voice, draws them back to the surface again, the children hesitate in their shadowy burrow-mouths. They blink in a different light, a pale glow that softens the burnt and charred vastness, and their bellies fill with the electric fizz of excitement. They pay scarcely any heed to the mass of warriors pressing and jostling on the edge of the gulf. Their leader, the same or a different one, clambers on shoulders to hoist himself above the common herd, points across the great darkness where the ocean once rolled and bellows, ‘See the gleam! The enemy is returning, a wall of shining steel is on its way. The earth is not dead. All is not over and lost! Will we wait here to defend our homeland, or will we go to meet them and fight?’

‘Fight!’ they roar with one voice.

‘Death or glory!’

‘Death and glory!’

‘Glorious death!’

‘Death! Death! Death!’

The children watch in spellbound silence, the pale light glittering in their eyes. Lips part in broad grins whalebone-bright. When the last of the shrieking warriors, the wounded and injured, the blinded and maimed, has thrown himself over the edge of the gulf, for better or worse, to hobble after those still whole and even more enraged, streaming across the ocean floor towards the silvery line, the children approach the edge in their turn. Their gaze is keen and true. It sees that the silver gleam is spreading, advancing, and it is sees what the gleam is not.

But what claims their attention is above. Their eyes are raised to the sky, to the darkness that is no longer a dense fog of nothingness, but is clear with the texture of the softest skin. They turn about, heads bent back to see the whole of the wonderment.

‘The stars have come back,’ they murmur.

‘And Moon.’

High, high as a sun, still pale, still scarred, the moon looks down. She curls, a beak preening broken tail feathers, putting right what can be put right. She is thin, emaciated, but she will grow, swell, and the children point and clap, and perhaps the light grows a little stronger. In the distance, by the still feeble light, the children see the dark and ragged swarm of warriors falter. The first ranks slow to a halt, and those behind rush past them to stop in their turn. A compact, jostling mass teeters on the brink of the silver line that isn’t a line, not a solid line of steel; the children see that.

‘Moon has brought back the ocean!’

No murmur, but a wild cry of joy leaps to join the silver light, the moon, the stars, the reflection of something wonderful in the returning water. The ocean returns the cry with a roar, rising through the black crust, gathering its strength into fists of waves. Not steel. This is no enemy advancing to meet the warriors, but the ocean, and they have nothing to pit against it.

On the edge of the gulf, the children watch the ocean take form, heaving and rolling, washing clean the burnt and the dead, the anger and the hatred. They wait, scarcely breathing for the wonder of it, until the swell that rolls and curls like seals or young whales touches the sheer cliff of the gulf. They watch with concern and tenderness as Moon limps across the dark to rest, knowing there will be no sun to follow, no day. Not yet. But the stars wink, and the children smile their bone-white smiles when they hear the faint music of the Moon’s song, calling, the song the whales learned so long ago. One day, Moon will find a star for the stricken earth. They hope. Perhaps.

Moon draws back that first tide, and the tide draws the carcasses of the warriors out to the deepest chasms, lets them go to rest, to gather barnacles on their chests like medals. The children make their way down what is now a cliff, to what is now a shore. They bend down to fill their hands with blackened grit, and search for signs of life.

One day, one of them will find a seed, a fragment, and plant it in a ray of broken moonlight, and the great revolution, that is the cycle of life, will begin again.