The End Has Come

The bodies are not decayed, but whole. Though they have been lying at the bottom of the consuming red sea they look like they’ve been asleep.

BEGIN.

“But —”

MY DEAR BEGIN.

no

That other voice, the low contrarian, makes itself louder, gets agitated. no —

She ignores the protesting voice. She can’t help herself. She focuses on the dead bodies on the floor of the sea and angles her head, tilts her chin, narrows her eyes — and she melts the fence, and she keeps staring, and the ground groans and rises miles of red seafloor rising upward until it levels with the abutting beach and it is one vast field of earth, and she keeps staring and the bodies rise and walk toward her.

Pea’s body fills with fear. She stumbles backward.

no says the protesting voice — no, you know better — while God says NOT ALONE, YOU NEEDN’T BE ALONE — and the shambling corpses of her dead parents raise their hands to her, and their flesh is restored but their eyes are all white, nothing but white.

No says the hidden voice and now Pea screams with it, “No!” and shakes her head violently and screams and lets the power cease flowing, and watches as the bodies of her parents slump to the ground like the corpses they were and always had been.

In the pause that follows there are no voices, there is no sound at all, and everything begins to drain out of Pea: her faith and her joy and her spirit. It burbles downward in her like water funneling out of a tub. Pea shuts her eyes and life is a dream, but she opens her eyes because it’s not a dream. It’s all real, and she has to find out what is happening.

“Who are you?”

God doesn’t answer.

you see — do you see —

“Hush,” she tells the secret voice, the contrary voice. She again addresses the one that came as God — that came to everyone as God. The voice that doomed her parents and her people. “What are you?”

YOU MUST UNDERSTAND, the voice begins, and then it hesitates — it hesitates! — and in that hesitation Pea feels her last drop of hope drain away. Her last vestige of faith. The last chance that it really was God singing to her, coaching her and coaxing her along. It’s gone. God, if God is real, would never hesitate. God needs never consider what to say next. Pea looks at the bodies of her mother and father, dead now for good. Dead now for real. She feels lonesome in the way that a person can only really feel lonesome when they’ve accepted that God isn’t real and death is forever.

The voice that isn’t God and never was God says it again: YOU MUST UNDERSTAND —

* * *

As she is told the story, Pea walks one more time through the world.

It’s remade now. It’s hers.

She skirts between alleys that she has repaved in pink limestone, trails sidewalks she’s dotted with flowering trees.

Eventually, as the full and terrible impact of what the voice is telling her sinks in, she no longer wants to look at it. She wants things to be how they were, but they’ll never be the same again.

She stops in the center of the lonely city and lowers her body into what used to be a black iron bench and is now a love seat, and she looks up at the remade skyline and waits for Him to be done.

* * *

Everybody fled the old world together. The doomed old world, the dying world. Everybody, those that still lived, they crowded onto ships, they took children by hands, they took what resources remained and set off in search of a new place to be.

The doomed species of a doomed planet sailing away together, fleeing scared into the stars.

When they had to, they split themselves into two groups: One group that sailed on, and one that stayed behind. Stayed behind here, on Pea’s own world, a desolate and just-barely-livable world.

The others went forward and kept on, kept searching. They had promised that they would return, one day, when they had found a real place. They had promised they’d return for those left behind.

Years passed. Generations gave way to generations. Those who had been left behind never gave up hope. They scanned the skies. They built their shabby little world, made what structures they were able to. Drew water, constructed a grid. They did the best that they could, always waiting.

All of this Pea knew already. Her ancestors were the ones who had been left behind on this sad little world. This was the world of her grandparents, the waiting world, the weary world. A world that had by that time given up already, given up on scanning the stars for the returning Others. No wonder it had been so easy for Pea to destroy. No wonder everything had come apart so easily. It wasn’t made of good stuff. It was a drywall world, of plaster, a tent city floating in a scrap of universe, year after year.

But now the voice goes on, to the part that Pea doesn’t know, that she couldn’t have known. He tells her of the other ones, who ventured further while Pea’s grandparents’ grandparents struggled and scraped.