Elliott found the first piece of his death under his fiancé’s pillow when he was only eighteen. It was a cogwheel of sorts, wrought from black iron, and he knew what it was the moment that he found it. Once he felt its weight in his hands, he walked out the door while she was still asleep, and left his ring behind.
He learned the art of the oil change, and made a life for himself at a truck stop in the Mojave Desert. Every few months, he found another black cogwheel clattering around under the hood of a vehicle that was just passing through. Even out there, in the great red nothing, the pieces found their way to him, one by one. They were not intended as parts of the machines that carried them, and were always found separate from all else inside. The cars seemed to be couriers serving an unknown supplier, and their drivers were none the wiser.
He started putting the pieces together; not because he wanted to die, but because he couldn’t resist his desire to know what they would become once united. He imagined that the finished machine would be a magnificent hearse; that if he waited long enough, pistons and camshafts and axles would begin to arrive, and he’d find himself building his own carriage to the afterlife. His dreams of such majesty faded as the decades passed, as nothing but more gears arrived, and the desert robbed him of all hope of anything changing again.
It was in this way that Elliott built his own death; a machine without any visible purpose. It was mostly-symmetrical sphere of hundreds of grooved wheels, ever silent, and ever still. He exhaled his last breath while waiting for the final piece to arrive, which he believed would at last set the whole thing in motion. There was just enough space left in the structure for a simple loop of metal, just slightly wider than a finger’s width.
When it comes to death, there are always missing pieces.
One can only die so lucky, after all.
The desert is as good a place as any for one's story to end.
Elliott found the first piece of his death under his fiancé’s pillow when he was only eighteen. It was a cogwheel of sorts, wrought from black iron, and he knew what it was the moment that he found it. Once he felt its weight in his hands, he walked out the door while she was still asleep, and left his ring behind.
We rode the elevator to the skyscraper’s peak, where its monstrous caldera awaited us. The goddess took my hand and led me to its ledge, and together, we gazed down into the pit. Fifty stories beneath us, a lake of molten rock could be seen churning and bubbling and folding in on itself. Only the furthest edges of the tower’s former floors remained, as most of the interior had melted inward from the heat.
The end of the world is neither exactly a time or a place; rather, it is a four-dimensional surface, curved and chaotic, which courts the path of the planet on its journey through space-time. Were one to visualize it using only three dimensions, it would seem almost ribbon-like, a black helix of fluttering death. Asteroids entangled by this dark fabric are certain to be drawn into the Earth’s gravitational pull.
Most who tell the story agree about how it started, but not where- some say Fargo, others, Des Moines. On a handful of computers in some high school’s library, clouds of gray and black pixels began flowing across their monitors until nothing else could be seen. Eventually, an overwhelming pressure behind the glass caused it to shatter, allowing clouds of virtual smoke to escape.
“This won’t be like your average rainbow-riding operation. We’ll be placing you inside of a research-grade kaleidoscope,” she explained to me as we ascended. “Hundreds of bifurcations per square millimeter. The human brain can absorb the patterns and colors of maybe half this, but the optic nerve is going to attempt to take it all in at once. I can imagine that you’re worried right now, but I promise that you’re going to witness something really special.”
The batteries bulge at the seams when inserted into your flashlight, as though filled with flesh or bubblegum. There’s no satisfying click of connection- only a sense that they don’t belong in such a device, and that any more pressure would cause them to burst. “Do not squeeze,” reads the mostly-black label in seven different languages. This warning is printed next to a cartoonish silhouette vomiting some sort of jagged fluid.
At times, the glass bulb on your bookshelf is filled with violet sands; at others, it is completely empty. You’ve watched the fine powder emerge from nowhere on several occasions, swirling outward from a needle’s-eye hole in space. You’ve also observed the grains sliding through one another until none are left, leaving it hollow once more. This is apparently no illusion; the bulb is far heavier while it appears to be full.
As a child, you accidentally fell asleep on the couch one night while watching the Discovery Channel; however, the thing that believes it is you (which you know as your body) stayed awake for several hours thereafter. During that time, it learned everything there was to know about chameleons from a National Geographic special. Just before you regained consciousness, a stray curl of your hair snapped a horsefly from the wall, beginning a long and terrible process of transformation.
You’d read enough Borges to know that wandering into a strange library alone was an ill-advised move, but you couldn’t resist this time around. Its gates exuded that incense of savory dust unique to the most ancient of tomes (which is, perhaps, the most tangible manifestation of wisdom known to mankind). From outside, it resembled a cave as much as it did a temple; you found it hard to determine whether the entrance was lined with stalactites, or columns, or teeth.
The fever brought with it dreams, and some say that the dreams themselves were the fever. We the afflicted passed in and out of vile consciousness, occasionally bursting through the surface of another world, only to sink back down into our overheating flesh. Our conversations with one another went on uninterrupted, for we were equally present in both realities.
“The world is ending, and it always will be.” Those nine words were emblazoned across the side of his thorium-powered rig, a sign of rare optimism while crossing what remained of the American interstate system. The boss told him that he would be hauling eighty-eight barrels of angel blood, and in this economy, he was willing to believe it- but he’d learned long ago not to get too curious when dealing with this sort of clientele. More than likely, it was just another batch of heavy water. At least, that’s what he told himself.
At first, we believed that the horizon splitter was only a myth. It sounded like a parody of the atomic bomb at most, inspired by the horror of something indivisible being mutilated by science. Word traveled from radio to radio that it was enroute, which we initially wrote off as disinformation from the enemy, just another of many attempts to incite fear. In the end, whether or not this was the case did not matter, as the bomb was able to do its job without existing at all.
Mere minutes after the virus took their lives, the victims began to grow their first feathers. Each plume was golden and translucent, centered by accents of violet and clover. The metamorphosis took place in moments thereafter; their pupils spiraled outward until abyssal whorls, their locks erupted into leonine manes, and all color faded from their blood until it was as clear as rainwater.
If it’s still the past while you’re reading this, you may wish to take notes. It wasn’t asteroids, or bombs, or angels with trumpets. During the last decade of our lives, there was a common sense of dread that we were living out the final act. Novelty was running low. Each and every one of us had been carrying the scripts for our own lives, but never noticed until the remaining pages were too thin to thumb through easily.