The Day After The World Ended

The room around Ian was unfamiliar in the light of the day after the
world ended.

To the side he could see uniform grey sky through a mildew dusted
window frame. Inside, the white washed ceiling was cracked, a tea
coloured flower of damp in one corner, a heavy incense perfume in the
air like white noise, a damp musk that barely covered the wet fabric
smell of dirty towels and cold, moist walls. Somewhere he could smell
something like ashes, like a fire gone out.

Twisting his head at an angle, he looked at the woman curled into a
ball next to him. Her hair was artificial black and crisp looking as if
it would snap and crumble into nothingness if he touched it, with a
line of angry red spots at the start of her hairline where her necklace
had nipped the hairs out. Sat on the white skin of her bicep, a yin
yang tattoo rose like a half dead sun above the horizon of the covers
and a sliver from the serrated edge of a condom packet was stuck to the
pale mushroom skin of her shoulder. Trapped under her neck, his arm was
both swollen and shrunken with numbness.

He had been dreaming. In the dream he had cancer, and was going to die
soon, but he wasn't frightened, he felt elated because he didn't have
to worry about getting cancer anymore. It had felt like something
grabbing him had finally let go, as if he had been holding his breathe
all of his life and had finally exhaled.

There were always strange dreams after sex, as if it shook up things
inside him, bringing hidden things to the surface. He probed his memory
of the previous night, the feeling of which still clung to him like a
fine dusting of soot.

No one had known what to say. They'd all watched it, over and over, one
plane then the other. There wasn't anything you could say. There had
been two buildings that he'd never paid attention to and then there
were two piles of rubble. It felt enormous, but at the same time didn't
feel like anything. They watched it on television and then they turned
the television off.

The pub was hushed, the television on the wall bracket that was never
turned off silently replaying the images again and again, like someone
repeating a phrase over and over, maybe to try and understand it more
or maybe to try to remember it.

Sat around the table staring at pint glasses they had all attempted to
sum up the profundity of what had happened. Chris said nothing would
ever be the same again. Knoxy said that no one was safe. Tony said that
it made everything else seem petty and made you realise what was
important in life. Ian drained his pint and looked over at the barmaid
with the black hair, who looked back at him. Wiping his mouth with the
back of his hand, he got up to get another round in.

She'd been slipping herself drinks all night, her hand shaking as she
put the change into his hand.

"I'm frightened", she'd said, her eyes dark and wet.

He'd nodded.

Walking back to her place after closing time, she'd pulled him into a
building site, and kissed him furiously amongst the bricks and
scaffolding and churned up earth. The inside of her mouth was hot and
she'd whispered "I want to feel alive" as she took out his cock and
kneeled down.

In the moonlight, she had looked as cold and pale as a marble. Standing
with his back pressed against a half finished wall, he felt he was
looking down at her from a great height.

Back at her place, by candlelight, the planes impacted silently again
and again in the fuzzy grey of her black and white television. On a
duvet spread on the floor, she had straddled him, her skin rough with
gooseflesh. Tears dropped like cold rain onto his chest as she looked
down at him. He tried to hold her, but there was no warmth anywhere, so
he watched her white smooth back shake and quiver as the footage
unspooled again and again. In the cold of the room they had sex until
he came, tense and sharp as if he were pumping out a stream of tiny
frozen diamonds that cut with exquisite sharpness.

"I felt safe until today" she said, her breath making a cloud in the
air above them. "I feel like the world's ended".

Putting his head on the clammy white dough of her breasts, a grey cloud
of sleep engulfed him.

"At least now we know what to be frightened of" were the last words
he'd heard himself say before the quiet rhythm of her sobs lulled him
into sleep.

In the cold bedroom, rain started to tap at the window. When his hand
brushed her shoulder as he got up to dress, there was no warmth.

A great excitement rose up inside of him, hard and glinting. He had
waited a long time and now the time was here.

He was living at the end of the world.