A Dreamer's Worlds

Forsaken

The universe was howling, but only I knew it. Only I heard the lonesome call of existence. It beckoned to me, called to me to join it, but I didn't. I stayed on my bench, looking over the cliffside. If I stepped over the cliff, I could join the universe.

Sometimes I wanted to. When the emptiness got to be too much, I wanted to walk right off that cliff and join the universe. But I never did. Instead I looked over the cliff at the city below. Once upon a time, it was busy with light and sound, but now it was dark and silent. The only light came from the occasional fire that ravaged the city. There was nothing to stop the fire, not anymore.

I stood from my bench and walked the overgrown path to my home. I'd once shared it with others, people who came from the mental hospitals and couldn't live on their own yet. Now their bodies decayed in a pile, too much work for someone like me to deal with. I, an old man with a limp, would just have to suffer the smell.

Or used to. I was used to it now. I couldn't smell the corpses anymore. On occasion I would go out and use a rake to push a body off the pile and expose some underneath. Made it easier for the scavengers to feast, so it became a chore of mine. Check the crops, fill the bird feeder, make sure the scavengers were eating my former housemates.

It was a terrible way to live, but it was the only way I had.

I couldn't remember how that day was, the day everyone died. I expect that it was just the halfway house and the city below that perished. Perhaps everywhere life had simply stopped. There was no wound upon my housemates when I found their bodies cooling, no poison that would kill them. They had just died, and I had remained. I sat on a couch, an old decrepit thing with springs poking right where they shouldn't. I tapped my cane on my foot, watching the TV that would never sound again. Mostly I listened to the universe call. I had never heard it before the world stopped, and now it never shut up.

I suppose I was okay with it. It made the most wondrous music.

A dog howled somewhere in the distance, a tiresome bellow that no longer had a purpose. Storm clouds rumbled above. Would they pour down rain and water my crops for me, or set fire once again to the city below?

It was growing dark, and shadows hid within the darkness. It was time for bed, for I had no power to turn on a light or even a candle to create a dancing flicker of light. I retired to my bed within the house, and readied myself to sleep.

The next morning would go much the same as today. Check the crops, fill the bird feeder, maintain the corpse pile, then sit on the bench by the cliff and listen to the universe until it was time for bed. Maybe someday it would change, and instead of returning to my bed I would walk off the cliff and join the universe.

I wasn't sure.