After the End
Vignette
Mickey simply ended.
She faded into the tousled picnic blanket, upon the craggy rock, among gnarled pines and above seething water. As the needle dropped from her arm, she slipped into the bath of finality. It wasn’t a look of peace I saw on her face — it was inanimateness. The wind blew and blew; I could swear her soul was swept away in the gust that succeeded the life departing her cancerous body.
As the electricity faded from her brain, I could feel…everything. Not any individual emotions — they all at once rushed through me, shaking my hands, blurring my eyes with tears, trapping a howl in my throat and rendering it silent. Avalanches of icy fire poured down my limbs. I withdrew and rolled into a ball.
As I lay on my side in the foetal position, I tried to wrestle myself away from this current too strong, but my grief rapidly crystallised into a single point of focus.
Mickey is gone, Mickey is gone, Mickey is gone. I tried to smash these repetitious acknowledgements, to hack at them with a mattock and axe, but the blows glanced off and fell into the current, along with my resolve.
In the torrent, clinging on for dear life, even as I lay still on the spotted picnic blanket.
I lay drowning, a hundred metres above the ocean and a metre away from Mickey.
