Sorrow

by Brian Wortley

  “Of course, for you saw all of humanity’s history. Do you remember?”

  “It startles me to know much of this I saw but how little I truly understood. In a way I knew all of these tales.”

  Protocuss led her gently to a new place. There back in the main room a side of the building had been torn away. Brady awaited her overlooking the end of the world. As she approached, she saw a table prepared with coffee and desserts. Sara blushed again touched by his thoughtfulness. He pulled the chair back for her. The gaping wound in the side of the structure overlooked the fiery depths with the falling columns of burning asteroids. All the world had been reduced to flames. There he served her the drink she’d come to love before the infection.

  Together they sat hand in hand with Peace. She rested her head on his shoulder and looked out from her weary eyes at the dying planet. She sat for what felt like days completely outside of the world.

  “It’s strange that destruction should bring such calm,” Sara whispered. “There is a serenity in death.”

  Brady made no reply leaving them to sit together in silence over the flames.

  “Would you dance with me?” he finally asked.

  She moved into his body and wrapped her one arm around his neck in a tight embrace. There at the world’s end, they swayed silhouetted against the burning chaos. Her heart quickly melted in the arms of his embrace and her head came to rest on him again.

  “I love you, Sara.”

  “And I love you!”

  As they danced, Sara felt a strange sensation come over her as if she were falling asleep again but also waking from a dream. She looked up into his eyes from her sleepy embrace muttering something he did not understand. They danced until Sara almost slept.

  She woke lifting her head from his shoulder to find they were surrounded by the Sleepers. They all stretched out their arms touching Brady and Sara. Together like a tide they all swayed back and forth wailing and chanting “Deliver us!” Like swirling spirits she saw their pleas surround her.

  Solemnly Brady placed his hands upon her shoulders. “You’ll fulfill my promise to save them, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said looking at him. Sara grasped Peace and held him close to her chest. Brady kissed Peace gently on the forehead without waking him.

  Even though she told herself it was not sad, tears still filled her eyes.

  “I know you can’t come with me,” Sara wailed. “And I know it isn’t really sad but I can’t help myself from crying!”

  “Go and your tears will end.”

  He smiled and looked to a new door in the far end of the room. Somehow she’d never noticed this passage until now. Everyone moved to the door but Brady could only approach as far as his chords would allow. Protocuss opened the doorway and a strange echo filled the darkness beyond. Brady motioned for her to step through and when she did, she found herself before a grand walkway looking as if it were built of light. Starting in the room they stood it, it continued on jutting out like a tongue into the vast and vivid colors of outer space.

  Before her burned the brilliance of the last majestic sunset. Vibrant orange and purple washed over her entire body as she stepped into its light. She almost glowed in it as did her companion Sleepers. They looked at her intently from their bulging, expectant eyes.

  Sara looked through the doorway back to Brady. Tears filled his eyes as he looked on her with a beautiful smile. His body swayed back and forth as if a great heat rose between them. And then a strange look came over him. His face became hideous and terrible. “You must go!” he screamed through the doorway. He looked down in horror at his hands as if they and their actions were not his own. In a startling gesture his hand shot up to the chords in his mind and ripped them out. As he did blood spilled down from his brain and a maniacal expression seized his face.

  In a tone unlike Sara had ever heard Brady use before, he yelled “Go!” Startled, she almost fell backwards but caught herself on the platform of light as the Sleepers followed. Roaring like an animal, Brady’s eyes burned with fire. He became to her something altogether frightening and different. “Leave!” he bellowed in an echoing voice of many. Scared, Sara bolted down the catwalk with Peace tightly in her arm. A great light shone about them burning from behind.

  Stepping out like a shadow from the darkness, she bolted from the dying planet shedding the grime of the fallen world. In only a few moments the company found themselves already far out into space.

  Without pausing to glance back, Sara became aware of a great heat behind her. In slow motion they dashed along the skinny railing in-between exploding asteroids and dying stars. In and out of majestic shapes and columns of light they fled. Waves of purple and green washed through them as they ran. Though many miles away, Sara felt her planet’s death. Its fury, unlike anything she could imagine, devoured Earth. Daring a glance backwards, Sara discovered not the remnant of her planet she’d known but something altogether foreign.

  Her beloved moon shattered itself into the dying red planet. She would have stayed to watch but the Sleepers dragged her forward. The hideous flare from the sun before them flew overhead, annihilating the little that remained of their old home.

  Sara gave in to the Sleeper’s tugs and ran alongside them. Like desperate theater hands escaping down the catwalk of their burning opera house, they dashed through the grandness of the galaxy as it came crashing down about them. Only then she realized the platform led them into the deadly boiling sun. Without any other path, they proceeded towards the collapsing star. As they bolted past it, Venus crumbled to pieces. The curtain of the heavens dissolved in the intensity revealing its mighty frameworks. Planets, stars, and all of space exploded, shooting off blinding displays of firework wonder.

  Under the deafening noise of the great roaring, they sprinted at last to the edges of the blistering sun. In one final gasp of air, Sara watched helplessly as the sun burst from its confines with tremendous fury engulfing all she’d ever known.

  And as naked spirits they ran from their shadowy shame into the enigma of eternity.

  * * *

  [i] These words Sara scribbled onto the tablecloth at dinner:

  The more I see, the more I believe apathy comes far closer to the opposite of love than hate.

  For love bears in it an intention. A worth expressed through acknowledgement. When I look into the homeless man’s eyes and call him “sir” it does something to him no amount of money could. I have recognized his intrinsic worth and echoed it back to him merely by noticing him and reacting to him.

  Hate still acknowledges this. If I hate someone, I am still regarding them as having those important, valuable human characteristics – I just react to them negatively. I think often of the person and even the power they may have over me or I wish to have over them. Their humanity is still very much in play.

  But king apathy disregards all these. Where hate would at least acknowledge the other person’s intrinsic values, apathy goes a step further. It refuses a soul the very basics of existence. It strips not only any possibility of love from their interaction but their very humanity along with it. In this, apathy reigns supreme. In its truest form, it has no cure. For it denies everything that makes us human. Like acid, it corrodes the entire interaction. Humanity is stripped out. The giver of apathy becomes a robot and the receiver an object.

  Once I have passed through the doorway of apathy, then I can do the unspeakable things to you. For if in my mind you are only an object, what is to keep me from enacting whatever evil I will on you? No prison too cruel. No torture too heinous.

  But love.

  Oh but love!

  I search you out for timeless ages and cannot find your limits.

  You ask me and I tell you. This is love as I have seen it:

  Intent. A purposeful reaching out from one to another.

  Sacrifice. Whether on a small or grand scale the truest form of love involves a sacrifice of the giver. The greater the love, the greater the sacrifi
ce.

  Expense. For as I know it, love is the most expensive treasure there is. An ounce of it outweighs the storehouses of the world. I never realized how petty I was to be envious of the inconsequential things of life. I was a girl throwing a fit over my pathetic stash of the most worthless treasures when behind me stood the most valuable things in the universe.

  Loyalty.

  Endurance.

  Acceptance. For how can the flower of love grow if above the soil death and ridicule awaits it?

  Beauty [Sara circled this word with several rings].

  Strength.

  Love is the only means by which we could ever have a chance of knowing or being known. The only garden possible of ever growing a cure to all this. I bow in the face of it. I give myself to the chance of it. It is the only gamble on which I’d stake it all. For me, it is love or it is nothing.

  [ii] These are the only remaining pages of the journal as they were committed to Sara’s memory:

  Doorway

  Am I young or old?

  All I remember is a doorway

  Have I always existed and only now they see me?

  Or was I made for a time such as this and never before existed?

  All of time is a blur as if it all happened exactly now.

  I cannot differentiate between the present or the past.

  Am I still dead?

  Does the king still have me?

  I am, above always, that man in that shattered mirror.

  I have never seen myself more perfectly reflected.

  Now I know I will never see the morning.

  Flames

  The flames once burning only in my eyes

  Have escaped to engulf everyone around me.

  I dreamed this but a nightmare

  The flames of time’s undoing.

  Tell me now, for I don’t know, does all the world burn?

  Are there any left alive who still might find a way?

  For I have searched high and low and cannot find a one

  Who does not eat and devour all his closest friends.

  This is a great mystery but I wrote this before the breaking.

  I Dreamed of You

  I dreamed of you

  As a dream within a dream.

  I see you and haunt your steps

  But you cannot perceive me.

  I feel you flowing through me

  As I feel the blood within my veins.

  I would speak to you

  But your ears they cannot hear.

  Though I know your language

  And hold your very mind

  Still the arrows of my words

  Cannot pierce your heart.

  Waking from my twisted dream

  I find I’ve slit my wrists

  And watch in weeping sadness

  As you bleed away from me.

  Despite all my tears and aching heart

  I cannot save you!

  Go back!

  Go back!

  You damned thing

  To feeding on the dead.

  For I have given living flesh

  But that you cannot take!

  That You Might Come With Me

  I would gladly take my fingers and split the hemispheres of my mind and shatter all the laws of time for one chance to tell her:

  Everything I have done has been accomplished that

  YOU MAY COME WITH ME!

  [This text was repeated another 99 times]

  To the Thing Below

  I saw you standing there in your gaping horror

  Your mouth open for lack of things to eat

  Eyes sullied, dull, and useless staring at the earth

  You looked at me through haunted memory.

  Though you cannot feel, I cup your rotting jaw.

  The lips that kissed - now grub-like worms

  Digging out the garden of your face.

  All that’s left of Pueblo’s beauty queen.

  Tell me, how can I not love you,

  You bastard of the earth?

  I see you – not this rotted flesh.

  The prisoner within the corpse.

  I, love’s vulture, will pick at you

  Until every last part is free.

  Strip off all your festering flesh

  To the thing below.

  Recede Now to the Shadows!

  Recede now to the shadows!

  What is this thing we’ve done?

  At first you were all too bright.

  And scared them all away.

  For the seekers of the night

  Must be lured our way.

  Now I push you in the dark

  But your eyes. They will shine out.

  The Only Way to You

  When I found the way, I burst within my frame

  And searched to find how I could best you

  That I may escape your wretched claw.

  I sought some catalyst.

  Some ace within the deck.

  That I might draw at my time of need.

  But when I looked on you, I saw you,

  How could I hate you once I knew?

  But none of my words you'd understand

  For you spoke only death.

  But if I bound you to my heart like a child

  And mastered the only thing you knew,

  There was my chance that a whisper might reach you.

  In these new unspoken words and actions

  I hoped to press myself through the barriers to touch you.

  For I cannot sing or else I would have sung you a lullaby.

  I cannot dance or else I would have tapped my feet and made you smile.

  But what I have, I give you.

  These my words. My labor.

  Because, you see, I’ve never met you and yet I love you

  With a love far beyond myself.

  Questions or comments please email Wortley.Brian@Gmail.com.