After the End

The Witness stood on the wind-stripped hill. Jagged stones, rearing from the ground like the broken teeth of giants, bore the scorched traces of wishes: R.I…

They had thought themselves giants. They had straddled the earth, filled it with the carillons of joy and the clamor of war; yet their final departure had been no more than a bird-cry on the air. Fleeting. Boneless. Unnoticed.

They had been much given to thinking about ‘after the end.’ They had embroidered their brief history—in the end it was brief--with stories that sang from jeweled tapestries, whispered from crumbling parchments, and echoed in the booming dark of caves. They had crammed claw-fingered mummies into catacombs, or hoisted them, inch by laboring inch, onto mountains. If there were no mountains handy, they built them in sand-sculpted spaces. They wrapped their dead in gold if they had it, in wishes if they didn’t.

Before the end, the Witness had sensed their presences as shadowy disturbances of the light; their voices as interruptions, intrusions into silence. Now they appeared to it, if at all, as broken branches, fallen leaves. Disconnected. In the end, there had been no time even for last wishes.

The Witness’s limbs rattled in the scouring wind. They had eaten its fruits, built homes from its boughs, sailed in its hollowed-out body to reap and rob. They had made rituals of its desecration, burned it to warm themselves, and capered around it, heedless of its agony. Now the Witness reached down deep for their bones, drew them up into itself, and transmuted them to slippery, grey-white bark. It wore their skeleton-stuff on the outside, the better to guide the occasional drops of needle-pointed rain down to its searching roots. What they had called seasons—the bright upwelling, the ripening, the scattering, the quiet, crystallizing dark—had gone with them. The heat and light that had taken them had faded to a pallid unchangingness. And the wind, always the wind.

Lately, though, the Witness had begun to sense…something. A brightening. A vibration in the sap it had distilled from their blood. Not like the tremors that from time to time still rocked the earth, disgorging the remnants of what they had called theirs, but flickers of sensation, random at first, then merging into a rhythm: go-gon, go-gon. Over what they had called days and nights, those boundaries of light and dark dissolved now, the rhythm had grown in certainty until it had become a purpose, a striving toward a single point, roaring and sparkling through the fibers the Witness had sucked from their muscle and sinew.

go-gon, go-gon, Go-GON! A measured thunder, like a mountain dancing. The Witness felt strength, their strength rising in its core. NOW streaked through it like fire. It trembled, felt itself about to burst. A thought: “don’t want…” hummed inside it; then, helpless against the torrent, it pushed.

On a bough, a small bump appeared. It swelled until, with a hacking crack, its skin split. The fissure widened, deepened; a grey, jelly-like nub took shape there, lengthened and thickened, the Witness’s skin peeling back from it, painfully. The nub thrust into the air, clenched, fist-like. Slowly, it unfurled. Pulsing veins drove pathways through its transparency. Just visible were the lines that would divide it into five; the clammy suggestion of webbing between them. They had always wanted to touch the sky.

The Witness shuddered. Grew still. It felt emptied, plundered, in need of solace. Its rooted self, its knotted heart, groped after memory. Memory came like a distant song: sweet, young, g-r-e-e-n. The Witness swayed and dreamed, its limbs light again with leaf and bud and feathered melody. GONE. It felt the word like an axe-blow.

Crimson hunger flared in the Witness: a rage to destroy the travesty of lost loveliness twitching on its bough, to give it—to give them--a final ‘The End’ without ‘After.’ The nub’s five tendrils, distinct now, were opening and closing; turning, seeking. “ONE IS NOT ENOUGH” hissed, unbidden, along the Witness’s fibres. It stiffened, resisted…don’t want… then screamed in silence as, against its weakening will, its roots plunged deeper, tearing through soil and stone. They began to feed.

The Witness screamed again as its boughs fractured. On every branch and twig, the clenched nubs punched into the air, bursting into sticky grey flower. Desire poured from the hatchlings, rushing up and up, filling the Witness’s topmost limbs. It felt their hunger to go beyond and beyond and beyond. They had always wanted to touch…they had always… memory was dissolving, a green mist in the wind. They…No, not they…IT.

Certainty flooded the Witness. IT, yes, IT had always wanted to touch the sky. There would be no limits to its reach, no barrier between it and beyond. And—now the imagining caressed it like a spring breeze—there would be others, perhaps, in the elsewhere.

One is not enough…It thought down through the pathways feeding its ravenous blooms, down to where its roots dragged and sucked with a thousand mouths. It called them to rise to the pale sky, the wind, and the broken-toothed land they had never seen. It called them to bear it across that land in thunder and magnificence.

The Witness felt power gather at its base. It heaved itself up, balanced, uncertainly, on its braiding roots, a hint of claws appearing at their tips. Found its place, enthroned on them; took a stride, then another. The wind parted for it. An R.I.P devolved into dust under its tread. It felt the jubilation in its waving blooms. They were coming fast now, the nubs bursting out of their clenched birth-shapes, dividing instantly, their tendrils tasting the air. The Witness heard its children sing. It was the composer, the choirmaster, the choreographer. Rootless. Forever after.

They had woven into their stories, visions and promises of ‘after’ and ‘return.’ But in all their imaginings they had seen only what they knew--mostly themselves--unchanged. Or at least, recognizable. What they had never fully understood was that after the end comes the endlessness of possibility.

***

Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her fiction appears in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, Flash Frontier, Milk Candy Review, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Citron Review, Nunum, Mom Egg Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Club Plum, Emerge Literary Journal, Sublunary Review, and Best Microfiction 2024.