End

I awoke. My eyes opened onto a grim palate of smoky gray and deep, opaque darkness blended into a looming shadow of despair. Flat on my back, I rest upon an endless dim and empty plain of dead grass and sharp rock, silently watched by that solemn, final sky above. I, the lone and supine body lying between the infinitely distant horizons. Nothing, now. Nothing, ever again. I have seen the end; I have seen many ends, and soon I shall see The End. Nothing now but rock and I, and our gloomy undertaker above. No need to move. The shifting shadows in the sky deepen, and that roiling blanket makes way for the emptiness, the emptiness that grows and will soon consume. Merely a spot in the sky, yet even the empty, deathly clouds make way for that burgeoning void. They twist and turn, a slow whorl of death; those silent whispers of finality swirl beside the emptiness, vanguards to the glorious End that begins to fill the sky. 

I watch. That deep ravine widens, exhorting the Nothing beyond to enter upon my realm, to consume, blindly, with cruelty and malice. The empty and endless horizons which were my final fortress walls begin to crumble. Soon it is I, I and no other, I and naught else. A deep and silent thunder resounds; a great and terrible voice calling from beyond the Nothing – and it is the End.

I awake. The birds chirp to greet a new day; the sunlight burns my eyes. But I see the world with a gaze bedimmed. My sole memory now the clouds, the clouds: the clouds bespoke the End of All.

-Martin Berlove '15