My eyes froze shut ages ago, but I can feel it all around me: The endless, frozen void of our solar system, remnants of an age before the great silence. I slept on a rock spinning through the cloud of debris I used to call home, long before the last ship blew. I haven't moved because there's nowhere to go. I haven't moved since the end began.
I was thirteen years old when a horse trampled my grandfather in the meadow behind our barn. He struggled for days, hooked up to all kinds of machines that just couldn't keep him alive the way his organs did. In the end, the doctors decided he was too old to heal, and they took the machines away. I stared up into the sky that night and wished on the brightest star that I would never die, no matter what.
Later I turned fourteen, and twenty, and thirty after that, but I never looked a single day older. My ninety-second birthday saw the dawn of a new era of interstellar warfare, and my hundred-and-third saw the dusk.
After that, it was just me. I lay on one of millions of rocks swirling in the silence where the Earth stood, and I waited for absolutely nothing. Nobody ever came for me, because nobody else survived. No aliens ever showed to pick up the pieces or finish me off. The sun is burning darker every year, and soon even that will leave me. And then...
And then nothing will remain except for me, drifting through space for thousands, millions, billions of years, alone.
Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Oh well. At least I still have my health.
No comments:
Post a Comment