70. End of the World Song: 'Still Alive', Lisa Miskovsky
When the world ended, the only thing I could think was “How cliché”. Fire raged around me, the snapcracklepop a perfect accompaniment to the screams—or would that be counterpoint? I never did pay any attention in music class. Asteroids punched holes in the roiling red clouds, turning the foreign sky-scape to so much Swiss cheese. Impacts shook the melting ground as the sky-rock landed dangerously close to me—from the tremors, it had to have been less than a mile away.
Idly, I looked around as I wiped coal off my face in an absent, habitual gesture that no longer meant anything. People everywhere were screaming and running and wailing, tripping over themselves in their haste to escape the inescapable. Panic and panic, almost everywhere I looked. Death, too, as those who had tripped were inevitably trampled. A shockwave reached my ears as I turned my eyes back to the sky, and barely audible over that was the repeated, triumphant shout: “I told you! I told you the end was coming!” A humorless smiled curved my lips as my vision focused on the newest hole punched in a cloud. A few moments passed in much the same way, but the tremors and shockwaves didn’t stop. In fact, they seemed to be getting stronger with each passing second.
It seemed that we had less time than the scientists had predicted. How unfortunate. How cliché.
That was my contribution to the end of the world. Those two simple words echoed out from my mind along a pathway I had never known was there. I felt, somehow, the press of thousands of bodies brushing past me. I felt tens of hundreds of people standing their ground against the flow, buffeted by the crowd, solitary, just like me. There were people in China, Germany, Prussia, South Africa, Ireland, New Mexico, all of them standing just as I was, looking up at the same sight.
The world was ending, and for the first time humanity was reaching its potential. How cliché, I thought again, and the sentiment was echoed. The world of my mind narrowed. It flowed, like electricity through a phone wire, along a set path that had been there all my life, to Downs Drive in Austin, Texas. I saw across the miles. I saw a man with dusty brown hair standing in a crowd staring up at the sky with a bemused look on his face. His hands were in the pockets of his blue jeans.
“Such a cowboy,” I teased in a whisper, and he replied in the same way, across the miles to the vision he saw of me.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a smile. “There’s never been any doubt of that.” Suddenly his eyes focused on something—a telephone pole falling towards where he stood. We both silently acknowledged that there was no escape for him, what with the crush of bodies, and I ached for this man I would never know. “Wish we coulda talked a bit longer,” he drawled, then disappeared.
I died with a smile on my face, because the universe had just proven wrong. What a spiteful place the world was—to learn in the last seconds of my existence that soul mates exist, and that I had one…
“How cliché.”
