End Eight: END LOVE

End Eight

END LOVE

(Series: @TheEndsOfTheWorld)

©2020 Boris D. Schleinkofer

Cover image and Author photo created by Boris D. Schleinkofer, with assistance from https://deepdreamgenerator.com

Interior artwork and Artist photo by Kent Christensen, with assistance from https://deepdreamgenerator.com & https://www.artbreeder.com

ZØZØ Edition

ISBN 9781005362072

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Something is wrong, oh very, very wrong here

The chaotic nature of the soured atmosphere

We have found ourselves participants in their nightmare

Rasputina, from Draconian Crackdown

Table of Contents

PART ONE: what our scars won't let us forget

PART TWO: the EYE of the LOCUST

PART THREE: END LOVE

APPENDIX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE ARTIST

PART ONE: what our scars won't let us forget

The sky breaks.

It sags and breathes upon my face.

In the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies

The world is full of enemies.

There is no safe place.

Anne Sexton, from Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn

Today, because I have learned that I can trust nothing and no one in this world, I picked out myself the color I want for my shroud: blue, the same deep blue almost verging into black as the shadow stabbing down from the ceiling.

Cremations are expensive. I'm aware that it will likely be a while that I must keep my body in the ground before I'll be able to afford the cremation, and blue keeps best over long periods of time in the ground or so I've heard, so that's why I chose that color. Granted, it lacks the dignity of black or purple, but I seriously doubt I'll care about that kind of thing or have any consideration for vanity or pride when I come back to deal with it. My body, I mean. If it goes that way. I hope, I truly hope, that it doesn't. If everything goes right I won't need it, but I have to plan for every eventuality. I've been trained in this by specialists.

I wished I had never been—I think that might have been where I began to go wrong. The being part, not the wishing part. Everything started going wrong just after all that started, which was I think about as far back as I can remember. But that would stand to reason, right?

The very first memory this body has is very dark, always dark. I was used to it. Yes, I'm well aware most people already know about death and rebirth and all that, but it came as a bit of a shock for me to remember it this time around. And I had to do it all on my own. The vastness of eternity, and I had to rediscover it again all by myself. Again.

Do you see what it's like to be abandoned? This feeling of loss and lostness carries over from one life to another. You learn to accept loneliness as an essential quality of existence. It's just the way things are, the way they always have been and will be. Anger is usually prescribed for too much sadness, but I am unable to raise it. I am swallowed up.

Occasionally a dim light, infinitely smaller and always a lesser emanation, would go shooting past like a meteor and then burn out into the endless blackness; sometimes a scrambled voice or two would cry something that sounded like my name, but I don’t really recall what that was or who they were. It didn’t matter—they never stayed long. I was used to that, too.

There was nothing, and there was me, and the ten-thousand things and all those that left. I didn’t need anything else. I spent time in the blackness; I spent time in my memories. I know that there were people that I wanted to remember….somewhere, someone. I knew that I would recognize them by the sounds of their voices, or the feel of their touch. I don't know if I ever did manage to find them—I believe the darkness may have gotten to me first.

But, if I am to be completely honest, that spark never fully dims. It clusters to itself, a life-sustaining implosion, the self-saving falling-within, and there feeds on its own flesh like a snake swallowing its tail.

I talked it out with Miss Clicks, but she didn't know what I should do, either—or at least she didn't say as much. She rarely has much to impart to me these days—none of them do—should I count myself lucky in that regard? They don't have much of anything good to say anymore, and who can blame them considering the treatment they've received at our hands? Atrocious.

I feel like something's blocking my thoughts, a blind-spot trying to fade into the background, some black skeleton hiding away in the back of the closet...

Where was I? Oh yes, that's right—I was wasting away in the dwindling light.

And I wonder exactly how many times I’d been there before, that in-between state waiting to be born. I knew there was the chance I might not make it this time and have to try again, there was more than a good chance I wouldn’t make it. You can never just forget exactly how this world works. I was hurt, and now I see the enemy everywhere.

And I can’t even really be sure that the alternative will be any better or if there'll even be any difference at all. For all I know, it’ll be just exactly the same as here but only on a different scale. If there is an alternative at all. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was just it, nothing else to escape to. It sure seems like it. I'm willing to take the chance, however. I have to be.

Thought creates reality. We conceive a thing and this conception becomes real. Reality, in turn, will determine what thoughts are available to us, and so reality creates thought which creates reality which creates thought which creates reality... You see how it goes. The only way to step outside this cycle is through the great gateway of death. Even I can see how necessary it is, though I may fight like the Absu to stave it off for as long as possible.

I can step beyond these rising stone walls and go outside, I can explore my neighborhood or go to the shops. I start by pushing myself to the door, where I put on my shoes, roll the slab out of the way, and step out into the sunlight...

And there is the yard full of dead bodies buried just deep enough to deter the scavengers. This is a graveyard, the one I see every day, full of my little friends who were. I can't walk through there, cannot pass through the land of the dead, not yet. Not now, not yet. I go back inside and roll the slab back into place behind me.

This darkness is everything. The nothing, and within it I who am nothing, is everything there is.

You see, here is the connection between me and the dying light—it is this collapse, the folding in upon oneself until it's all gone and there's absolutely nothing left. That is how I wish things to be; I no longer feel I have a place in this world, or that it ever did hold a place for me before and I'd really just been imagining that I had this whole time, when I hadn't...

I know how much of a pain in the ass I'm being. I can't help it, it's what I do. I've reached the end of the tunnel, and it's just dirt here, no light.

But the spark cannot be killed so easily. It seeks to rekindle.

Today I had decided I would try to re-enter the world as I once knew it, to see if I could hold place with others like myself, to find out if there was another with whom I could connect and feel once again human. Without my word, I have found out through hard lesson after hard lesson, I am nothing. These days, I am much less inclined to cheat myself in this manner. I keep my word, and I did as I'd promised myself I would do. I closed my eyes and ran from my place of safety until I had no idea where I was or how I was to get back home.

This is a lie, a sideways hinting in colorful metaphor at the situation which would be so ugly otherwise. There was nothing brave or adventurous or given to abandon about my excursion outside; there was nothing genuine to any of it. I went out to the cafe to sip macca and discover if other people were real. There was only one other human in there besides myself and the young chiseler behind the counter, but that person sat with their back turned to me and I never saw their face. It could have been anyone, and I wanted to approach that other person in there with me, to spin them around and see if they had a real face or whether it would be just a smooth facade like a mannequin. I didn't approach them. I may never know. The only reason I was sure that they were actually alive was because I heard them cough, twice. Not a good sign.

There was the other chiseler girl working behind the counter, but it's not like she was a real person. She'd say her rote with me, the customary call-and-response of retail tendered, but I won't need to tell you that it was only a cheap substitute for actual connection. Behind the counter, giving and taking, we'll have four or five acceptable topics of conversation in which we could engage if we wanted to, but why bother? I already knew all about the weather outside, I had just come from there. Yes, everything I'd just purchased was as I expected it to be. Yes, you may consider me served and have permission to forget about me. No, I won't make any problems for you or your establishment. Even though we have this exchange of pre-selected pleasantries, I will come away from it feeling less, depleted somehow, as if I paid for my drink with some subtle aspect of spirit and now wonder if it was really worth the price.

I stayed in the cafe for an hour sipping my macca, and no one else came in to join me. After a while, I turned to check on my mannequin-companion only to find them gone. I hadn't noticed them leaving. I returned after bringing my cup to the counter without having spoken a word the entire time, other than to make a demand for a drink I could no longer taste in my mouth. I walked back home over miles of hills that would have taken minutes in a car, but which kept me the better part of the day hiking up and down the scrublands. I am more tired now than I have ever been in my entire life, and quite sore in the legs.

I sit in my room, in the hard wooden chair with my back pressed against the hard wooden rails and I know that I am at the end. I have a lamp burning for warmth but it isn't enough to keep my breath from fogging the air. I can't stand the sound of the ticking clock, so it stops. It does not do me this as a favor, I know. Nothing is for free. It must be broken.

The dim flickering of the lamp is all I can see, now. There are walls there, in the darkness, I know. I know they are there, but it still looks like the blackness goes on forever, infinite, unchecked. This is what it feels like to have run out of hope, I know. This is another end, but not one like the others—I will not let it be so. This one is more final, if such a thing is possible. I don't suppose it is. I will find out anyway, one way or another.

I have seven secrets to keep for this occasion.

And there's the trick of it, right? That the self is what'll find out whether or not it's real, but only in its dissolution. That the self is what's constant and the only thing which is so, and it will only know this by taking itself apart. We call this the 'second and final' death and it might actually be, I wouldn't know. I suppose it could probably go either way.

The flame refuses to die.

I don't want to think about those other ends just yet. Not yet. They elude me anyway, for the most part, more dim flickerings in an area I can't quite see clearly. They blur into each other and go indistinct, snippets of lives spent ages ago mixed up together and left ashy.

My little marble desk, where I place my tablet for work—and I suppose I shall call it mine now, for I've definitely earned it—takes up most of the room. I don't need much space, I take up very little. There is a multi-colored cloth sheet draped over it because I don't like the look of the rough-hewn stone; the sheet's colors have faded and it is worn through in spots, but I don't mind it. It is a warm memory of something that once was, someone I knew a long time ago...

I can't yet bring myself to say her name. I'm going to throw her death-blanket away, I will, I will just as soon as I get up...

There is me, and there is my lamp slowly burning out but more quickly by the minute, and there is the endless nothing advancing upon me. I'm alone in my circle against the darkness. I'm alone, perfectly alone at last.

I was like this before, I know. In all my lives I've been the outsider, uncomfortable among others of my kind, if I could be said to have such. I've never really fit in anywhere. In this life, when I was young and still given to approaching others, still dumb enough to try making friends with the children around me, they were always so quick to let me know that I was not their sort and unwelcome. I didn't ever try to press it, instead isolating as they would have me do until I'd all but disappeared into myself. This pattern was to repeat throughout my life, and the lost child grew into the shade of a person I am now, but I will not be for much longer and I don't regret the decision I made to stay out of the world. If not for the interventions of my two 'friends' who are both now gone, of course, I wouldn't have stuck it out this long.

The worst part is that I know I will otherwise be doomed to repeat this again, forever.

I will play this same isolation out again and again, undoing myself piece by piece until there is finally nothing left, only to start it all over again and again uncontrollably, making the same moves over and over on a gameboard with only one player. And that player is going to be the loser, forever.

He was the one who told me that, who gave me that vision and its metaphor. We were having dinner; I'd made him his favorite sturgeon fillet, just the way he liked it with the bean-sauce. It was my specialty, and it was my birthday and I was leading up to asking him for a present. I'd told him how much I liked games—I was going to tell him about the new floating garden installation in the eastern wing of the Game Theory Administration building like the one they have in El Babe in the Western lands, when he interrupted to call me out as a loser.

I don't think he really meant to do it—I can't say for sure that he was even aware that he'd done anything in the first place. 'You lose at solitaire, all the time, what did you expect? To win?' he asked and went back to fingering his glass pane. I went livid, not with rage but rather a freak withering shame that threatened to collapse me in a heap on the floor. I did not want to give my Husband that victory, and I didn't, but it cost me to stay on my feet with a platter of fish held in my hands, it cost me greatly.

I set the fish down on the table and I rested my arms against its surface, and then I put the serving knife into his hand to finish the joke of an evening. I put the knife into his hand, sinking it into the flesh below his knuckles and chipping against our little table. We didn't have proud furniture then, he and I. We never did. I have even less now, but it doesn't matter. I don't mind being humble, I know I've earned it. He didn't love me by that point, if he ever did, and it was the last meal we shared together and only a few short hours before they left and I would never see him again. Against all probability, I still miss him sometimes. More often than I care to admit.

Of the two feral cats that come around, only one of them is very fond of me and will let me stroke his hair. Both of them still come by, as I am always good for an extra snack or two. Or three. Or four. I won't go on about it. Suffice it to say that they are the best company I have these days.

I was hit by a small vehicle in my forty-seventh year and bedridden for seventeen months. The kid who hit me, I'm sure of it, was yammering on his tele-comm when he collided with my bicycle—and don't get me started on how much I hate those things. They have been the death of me. The tele-comm, not the bicycle. I came out from behind another vehicle and started to cross the road when the kid came around a corner and creamed into me. I went down, and the bike-frame went under the car and gouged into the street with a spray of sparks and metal. My Husband and the people with whom he works, I come to suspect more and more, probably had something to do with it.

I had prayed in my despair for a quick death, a relatively painless one that I wouldn't see coming, and I had nearly gotten what I'd asked for. I say nearly because it wasn't what I'd wanted it to be, wasn't the spontaneous release from a lifetime of grief into the pure freedom of erasure. It wasn't that at all. I still think with pain in my chest of those dark days stuck in that bed, on that sticky mattress unable to move anything from my waist down and unwilling to be a part of the world, high on soma until I didn't know night from day or one week from the next. You cannot imagine—or if you can because you know from experience, and experience is the only way one can truly know the extent of these sufferings, then you've already done your best to forget—the true depths of emotional blackness and despair that comes with powerlessness, at being subject to the whims of fate and dependent for care upon those who hate you.

Oh yes, I was hated. Those who were obligated to be my wardens, my Husband Tim and mistress Elza—there, I've said the name—resented their duties to be sure, and they likewise resented my refusal to go along with what I earlier wished for myself, to be set free from the nightmare that my life had become. I begged them, pleaded with them both, separately and together, to let me die but was refused. I shared with them my pain, and my resolute hopelessness, and other things like shock and loss, not knowing at the time as they denied me my death just how much worse those same things would soon become.

But I digress.

I'd been married to Tim for twenty-eight years and Elza for thirty-nine when I had my accident. Yes, we did marry young, Elza and I not so unusual for our kind but Tim took some chagrin for it. We were awarded a house much earlier in life than most of our neighbors as a result, and were by far the youngest on our block. We were unusual in that way, in the longevity of our mutual arrangements and understandings, and I believe we made a name for ourselves in the community as aberrants, possibly even as anti-social. You never really knew when a neighborhood would turn on you and we usually just kept to ourselves and stayed out of other people's business. Tim dealt with the social obligations and Elza took care of everything else, leaving me free to mind the books and write my stories for children. It was just short of being all I'd ever wanted, and it lasted for a few good years before I began to notice the changes in my Husband.

Of the two cats who come sometimes to visit me, the white female is my favorite, but it's the tuxedo male who rubs against my leg asking to be petted. He also bullies all the snacks away from her before she has the chance to get to them, though he does always leave her a portion. I want to step in between them and ensure that everyone gets an equitable share even though I know it to be expressly forbidden. I keep my peace.

I met him for the first time when I was only twelve years old. We lost that child—for how could I not, at that unripened age? It was an ill-fated and stupid course of action and to be expected, considering how I went about everything so wrongly. I had been so eager, and up to that point I'd survived by acting firmly on my decisions, until it destroyed me. I got more than what I deserved for what I'd done. Tim and I both knew I'd crossed not one but several lines and that my actions demonstrated an incompatibility we should have heeded, and yet we didn't. I told myself that I loved him, I told myself that we could truly build a life together. I consoled myself then, as I do now, with pretty words to cushion the dreadful facts. He made me wait a full seven years before he would marry me, even after I suffered for him as I did then. And would again. And again. And again.

He was already into his late thirties and so the wait for him was a pain of love, as I was yet to flower. My Tim was patient and caring, and I believed him when he told me that we were worth the wait. Yes, I understand that many in our society would look upon us and our relationship with disapproval and judgment, and we were absolutely interrogated by our neighbors when we announced our intention to cohabit despite our inability to produce children. The women and men of our district had nothing but criticism for my barrenness, but he'd thought we could compensate for that by winding Elza into the thread. Elza, my best friend, my intended surrogate who wasn't even interested in men, Elza my heart—the betrayer.

Elza, doe-eyed, with curls like a waterfall and who moved like a serpent; she was easily the most beautiful woman I have ever known, met or even seen. I felt that way when I first met her and I feel the same to this day. She was always mischievous, even evil some would say, with a heart of gold easily broken. We were just little girls, but I immediately recognized a life-soul partner from the moment I laid eyes on her. She was like that. In a world of hostile strangers, she was the one person who knew my mind, could share my thoughts before I'd verbalized them, who knew what I was about to say or do before I'd decided for myself. She was the one with the great love for small animals which she spread to me only after so much misfortune. Her heart had that power, was so strong and pure in her affections that they impressed their powers upon those close by. She had other idiosyncrasies about her: there were certain unexplainable things she would refuse to do—she would, for instance, be unable to fall asleep unless her head was to the North, or would go out of her way in order to pass clockwise around an obstacle, or refuse to watch the serials with us unless they were played in reverse order. At those times when she didn't get what she wanted, she would turn red in the face and break out in hives until someone relented and allowed her to have her way. Actual hives. I still don't know how she did it.

Strange behaviors like that only added fuel to our clan's gossip-fires and cemented our shared isolation. I did not mind. I say that because I wanted to believe that I was fulfilled with the company of my partners, that we were sufficient to provide for each other's needs and bond with an intimacy unknowable to others. It was what I'd always thought I'd wanted.

These two were supposed to be my forever-friends. Forever was so much shorter than I'd thought it was going to be. It wasn't forever at all. I know I'm supposed to be grateful for the time that we did have together, and I will choose to remember mostly the good parts of what we shared, but...

When my Husband left, he took Elza with him. She abandoned me, she who was the first, and left with him who was second. My own parents, whom I'd never met and didn't care enough to seek out, at least had the decency to leave me alone after creating me so that I never got the chance to feel like I was missing out on something not having them around. Most people live that way and I don't feel like I'm anything special, but they could at least have warned me how empty the world would be without my lifemates.

I feel like I'm rambling. I try so hard to blame myself for how things went wrong, and I know that I'm at least partly at fault for those events, but mostly I just want to remember the good parts of my life and forget the rest. I can forget their betrayal, I can forget my isolation. I can forget every little thing that has ever been wrong or gone