Story #1: THE ENDLING
The Endling
Two individuals from opposite ends of the spectrum befriend each other
I loved visiting Annie. It
was the best part of my day, because school could get boring when you already
knew everything there was to know about everything.
But visiting her? Now, that
was interesting. Annie was full of so many stories; stories of things I’d
never seen, never done, never dreamed about. Always full of tales from
her youth, all the crazy things she and her friends got up to.
It was a pity that no one
cared about her now.
Oh, they’d cared before,
visited her every day, eager to hear her speak. But that was many, many nights
ago, and they didn’t care anymore.
I did.
“Q!” she exclaimed from the
rocking chair on her porch. She eagerly clapped her wrinkly hands together, watching
me make my way to her from behind her cat-eye spectacles. “I hope you brought
me something good today.”
“Of course,” I told her,
reaching behind me to produce the small black bag I was carrying.
“You’re a star!” she
whooped. “That’s a box of Marlboro. And…no…it can’t be –”
“Yes. Johnnie Walking.”
“Walker, dear,” she
said sharply. “Best scotch whiskey on God’s green earth.”
“I will never understand your
fascination with smoke and ethanol,” I told her with a shake of my head, joining
her on the seat she always left out for me.
“It was a different time,
that’s for sure,” she informed me, lighting up her cigarette. As usual, I
braced myself for the strong sooty smell that followed. “We were happy,
poisoning our bodies. We knew, and we didn’t care. My liver’s got more holes
than a sieve, do you know that?”
“Why would you keep doing
something that’s bad for you?” I genuinely wanted to know. It didn’t make sense
to me.
“It’s just what we did, Q,”
she told me, mashing the cigarette into the wooden arm of her chair. There was
a long trail of black burn marks of cigarettes before that. “Call it human
nature. But why do the bad things always feel so good?”
I couldn’t answer that, and
I didn’t know if she even wanted me to. We sat in silence for a while as she slowly
sipped on her drink straight from the bottle. Occasionally, she’d tell me about
her two daughters who’d died long before her. She told me the story as if she’d
forgotten that she’d told it to me time and time again already, but I listened
as if it were the first time. R told me that this was caused by something wrong
in her brain—Alzheimer’s—and that it would never go away.
“I’m tired now, Q,” Annie
said with a yawn, looking at me with watery brown eyes. “See you tomorrow?”
“Of course,” I reassured
her. “Tomorrow.”
I helped her up, this small,
frail, silver-haired woman I’d grown attached to, and she shuffled back into
her house. I didn’t leave until she closed the door gently behind her.
The next day, Annie’s
rocking chair was unexpectedly empty. She knew what time I came, and yet…she wasn’t
sitting there waiting for me.
“That was the last of the
Homo Sapiens Exhibit.” R’s raspy voice came from behind me, and just like that,
I knew.
“Did she suffer?” I asked
him.
“I don’t know, Q. Humans
are funny that way. She died in her sleep. Most of them weren’t as lucky.”
I was happy about that. It must’ve
been a peaceful death.
Clutching the unopened bottle
of whiskey to my chest, I took one last look at the tiny house with its imitation
lawn and trees; at the empty, rickety chairs on the porch. The overhead lights cast
a dazzling glow over the house that gave Annie the illusion that she really was
on her sunny farm in Mississippi.
But there was no longer any Mississippi for
her to call home, and now, there was no more Annie.
No more humans on this
planet they’d called Earth.
Today, I thought to myself as I slithered away, today, I will take a shot
for her.
END
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