The world ends on a Wednesday. You’re nearly through your status report. One more sentence explaining the Gantt chart you spent two hours massaging into place, and then your mid-week review would’ve been done. That chart was like a seed you’d nestled tenderly in the earth, positioned just so beneath a beam of sunlight, and meticulously watered to the brink of blooming. An almost-life before living was snuffed out.
Does anything exist if it is not measured? You quantify, therefore you are. By this logic you could never finish that report. Maybe it was your Gantt chart that was propping up reality. Maybe you never had a chance to wade into the deep sea of daydreams lapping at the shores of your desk because all of your existence relied on charts and formulas and the measurable results of every keystroke.
Remember that Zoom call where you muted your camera and searched for safaris? You had a sudden desire to follow every path, to taste every flavor at life’s buffet. You knew then you’d never watch hyenas pick clean the muddled remains of a springbok ewe or trek gorillas across mountaintops simmering beneath veils of gray mist, but you were good at diverting into dreams.
The flicker of you that remains gnaws on the carcass of your unfinished report for eternities. Hovering in the ether, you’ll think over and over for millennia: if only I typed that last sentence. If only I finished one thing before everything ended. Maybe I’d have gone somewhere then – Elysian Fields, Valhalla, Candyland, The Price is Right.
Surely your boss, Bruce of the Blue Stare, is dead too. Every lingering star glints like the light from his laptop on his spectacles. You would squint if you had eyes, and then maybe you’d see the echo of his frazzled hair sketched in stardust over the open void of the once-verdant earth, now a fallow field of atoms for gamma rays to comb and plow and plant their radiation.
Every meeting with Bruce was radiant with circumspection. Bruce’s glasses imprisoned the light that emanated from Excel spreadsheets, reflecting it back at you. The eyeshine of the corporate jungle, ever watchful from the weeds.
You won’t miss the expanse of his beard or the way he hen-pecked through Zoom calls or the rumble of his cleared throat emptying the line like thunder over the savanna that day when you stayed on the call after everyone hung up because you were clicking through a maze of browser windows displaying jackets you weren’t going to buy for the safari you would never take. Bruce’s eyes darted over you like he could read every idea you were ever made of. Did he see your mother’s meticulous devotion to sorting laundry by the type of care required? Did he see your father in all his glory, holding court at the Holiday Inn, a whiskey toast raised in deference to the gods of assimilation, squeezing himself into the narrow space between Citizen and Immigrant like everyone else untethered by colonialism? You can always recall your father – the way he sat alongside white men, his brown body even shorter than yours, nearly pygmy beside the Ohio natives fed on corn and hoarfrost.
Your father and the oily scent of his hair on weekends when he napped and watched cowboy movies and puttered from room to room, aimless. Your mother and her stout shoulders stooped over the garden, doused in midday heat. Mom, collecting fossils from roadside gravel and rinsing aluminum foil for reuse and collecting breadcrusts from your garbage can for the ducks skimming along the reservoir.
Did the blue mirror of Bruce’s eyes perceive more than they reflected? Could he conjure the friends who propped you against the alley beside Hot Corner Coffee when you drank too many midori sours while grieving your dalliance with a boy who didn’t love you? Did he know how many times you met that boy after he foreswore your love, how many times he returned to the warm stream of your desire like a fish swimming upriver from its intentions? Maybe Bruce watched through his polished glasses the night you braved a hurricane to kiss the boy under the yellow awning of an empty café off Broad Street. Perhaps those lenses captured the shape of your anguish after the boy stamped into your heart the words I can’t anymore in a parking lot outside of a Wendy’s in Athens, Georgia, that sunlit afternoon when your body tilted left then right then doubled over the way sawgrass bows to the wind off the Atlantic.
There were others like that boy. The tender hearts you married and divorced. Women you wrapped around yourself for warmth, their memories under your skin like marrow.
And then came the boy you birthed – the only boy forever after. He arrived minnow-wet from the waters of your body, silver-faced in the incandescent light of the delivery room. You anticipated his cries while the seconds dawdled. You watched the clock’s goggling eye, muttering the sweet nothings of a prayer called forward from the recesses of childhood, when you huddled in bed imagining demons traveled along the roads of treeshadow mapped over your bedroom walls.
You think on those shadows for many years. You remember your son did cry, did toddle, did crack fart jokes at the dinner table. One summer was consumed with talk of tornadoes. The calamity of winds. How devastation could descend. How lives could get spun up, whisked off.
Did Bruce remember you had a son you swaddled? Could he long alongside you for the feeling of cold feet burrowing under your legs when a boy crawled into bed at 3:00 AM, wet-faced as the day he was born, whispering about the end times.
Eons pass. How dark is a night without day to measure against it? Where is the broiling light of the defiant sun that all your life relentlessly rose and set and rose again?
In the seventh age, you realize it is evident there is no God.
Or is it?
You consider maybe you’re just waiting on the punchline of the cosmic joke. Maybe God is like Bruce, waiting for you to wake up to the moment. Maybe it’s just you, dangled over an abyss of memory, unable to move on while all the other scattered particles of the once-living caught solar winds and surfed them to Nirvana. You hope your son made it there. You hope he’s sipping ambrosia in an Eden that’s beyond you.
In the darkness, you think about all the things you had left to do. That status report. The raising of your child. Two handwash-only dishes you left beside the sink for later. Films you swore you’d see. Your unclipped toenails. Novels you vowed to finish.
You’re dead for a long time before you remember to let go of the unfinished report. You drift fully into memory then. The round softness of your son’s face. Mother easing the tape off wrapped presents to save the paper. The amber glint of pennies you collected from the sidewalk outside of TJ Maxx and that smell of copper like blood on your hands. Linden blossoms drifting along the street like snow. Your father cracking into curried crabs and placing the best meat on your plate. The sound wind makes when you’re three years old, parked in front of the oscillating fan, and you lean in to lend it your voice. The relief of a loud sneeze. Chlorophyll scent of clipped grass. Sheets snapping in the wind. Cattails shedding fur. A wish made on dandelion scruff, blown wayward by your breath. The whisper of firefly wings in the palm of your hand.
Eventually, your memories loosen and fray.
Remember fireflies?
How they burn? How they fly?
*
Softly, you drift in such quiet.
Andrea Thurairatnam Imdacha (she/her) is a genderqueer writer and poet of Sri Lankan and Hungarian heritage who hails from Savannah, GA. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Chestnut Review, North American Review, Literary Mama, Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry, and other publications. Andrea resides in the Cleveland area with her husband, son, and the ghosts of her unfinished stories. She is currently at work on a novel.
