There is a thing growing inside his head. It takes the words sometimes. Sometimes there are blinding headaches, brilliant flashes of light. He feels wretched and gets dizzy and pukes until all the insides of him are bruised and slick with bile.

Still, there is joy. While there is life there is joy.

Most days he is content to sit on a chair on their back porch and watch the trees grow. It takes a lot of patience, but if you can muster enough to sit for quite a while, you will be rewarded with the sight of the green branches reaching up and up and up toward the sunlight.

It is the paradox of his last hours, how ever many there may end up to be. That when time is running short, only then he is able to slow down and pay attention, to really notice the ways things grow and change all around.

And she is no exception. He loves to sit on their porch and watch her sitting there with him, perhaps reading a book, perhaps working a crossword. It doesn’t matter what she is doing. He is glad she is doing it here with him.

It wasn’t fair to ask her to spend so much time just sitting, but it was a thing he could not bring himself to mention. Her being here was the only thing that kept him here. He loved sharing these moments, short and fleeting as they were, with her.

He doesn’t read much anymore. Or write. The words had stopped almost entirely. But there was so much goodness in the quality of his observation. The time spent just sitting and noticing.

Someday, soon enough, the abyss will reach up and claim him. And he will pass into that negative space. Not darkness so much as absence. Emptiness. There was the space where he was and then the space in which he wasn’t.

He hoped he wouldn’t feel anything. That the passing wouldn’t be painful but if there was meant to be pain he hoped he might endure it with a measure of grace.

And when he fell into that final dark chasm, he hoped it might not be cold. That is might be warm, welcoming and then erasure.

And how like a dream, that upon waking, dissipates like smoke. And how frail this thing he had come to call his life. And how he hoped upon dying that he would not look back on this time with any kind of regret. The wrong things done. The right things not done.

“Are you thirsty?” she asks him. She has learned not to ask what he is thinking. He is already living in a place where she cannot follow.

Enough to have her back home with him again. To know the joy that comes from being her father and from seeing the strong, powerful, happy creature she has become. Enough to look into the future and see at least a few more moments like this shared. Together. And the touch of her hand on his was solace.

“Yes,” he tells her but not because the thing growing inside his head has taken all the words. Because sometimes Yes is everything that needs to be said.

Prompt: “Lives” by Modest Mouse

***

Its hard to remember that life is short. It feels so long sometimes.

These thoughts curling like smoke inside her skull.

Christine lit another cigarette, trying not to notice the small but growing pile of crushed butts on the deck railing. She promised Mark she wouldn’t smoke again, but it was an unfair promise to make. It hadn’t started as a desire for the cigarette, the nicotine. What drew her at first was the little spark, that small, incendiary flash of light near her fingers as she struck another match.

Her hands shook, just a little, before that small ignition. Mark hadn’t noticed yet, that slight palsy creeping into her hands. When he did, she would tell him not to worry, that it is was just the usual anxiety setting in.

And there were times when she could let herself believe that was true. That the faint tremor at her periphery, minor really, was no concern. And the way her fingers steadied once the match was lit and the cigarette kissed with flame made it easier to trust.

But trust is not truth.Truth is more complicated. Truth is the way her right foot dragged the ground sometimes when she walked. Truth was the pins and needles in her toes, the way her entire foot sometimes felt like an anchor plunged in a dark, cold sea.

She hadn’t seen a doctor yet. Where was the point in that? They could only run tests. They could only place her somewhere on the mathematical spectrum of possibility.

Christine had been through it before with her father. She had carried him to every appointment, each visit a bit more to manage each time as the withering penetrated and ate him alive from the edges.

There were medications. Blizzards of prescription pads. Endless cocktails of pills, large and small. The Blue Chokers. The Pink Pukers. And the mysterious purple that always seemed to lodge sideways in the throat, refusing to be swallowed.

And between medications, the interminable scans and pictures. The intrusion of cameras and images as the team of technologists mapped and photographed her father’s interior self. She had seen her father turned into a ghost before his time. The furtive image of bone and muscle and sinew. The constant reminder of things inside that would eventually come out. And the feeling that the images and scans were all futile. So much useless espionage into the unseen corridors of her father’s inner works, each documenting a new stage, a new progression.

Perhaps it was better not to know. Christine thought of Mark. Some things are better hidden.

Except that everything hidden gets revealed some time.

This was the brutal truth of life. Everything hidden gets revealed.

Christine crushed the cigarette, lit another and inhaled, waiting for Mark to come home.

Prompt: “Pure & Easy” by The Dining Rooms

***

The thing about the end of the world is you never see it coming. It comes like a bad divorce or a crippling disease. Looking back, the signs were always there but you are always living one day away from complete catastrophe and standing in that slim, sanctified space, you let yourself believe things aren’t as bad as they might appear to be until one day you wake up and realized they are much worse.

It is like being pushed from a ledge, this sudden sharp shove from one reality, constructed for maximum comfort and soft confusion, into a hard, bright light that shines relentless, brutal with its honesty, generous with regret.

These are the things I think about when I am drinking too much, which is to say, pretty much everyday and all the time.

You can make yourself crazy looking backward for signs. You will see them everywhere, the litter of your life. Clothes strewn on a highway in the aftermath of a hurricane. The high-water mark on your walls after the flood.

I was never one for reading the Bible. I kept one. I carried it with me, of course. The one my mother gave me when I turned twelve and she realized too late that I might be ill-equipped to make the virtuous decisions when times got hard. It must have been like watching a cake bake after you’ve realized you forgotten to add the sugar to the mix. How awful to realize you have used the last ingredients in your cupboard and you’ve forgotten the most important thing. And to have to sit and watch cake batter that’s already been mixed, apply heat and take shape. There is none of that life-affirming anticipation stuff parents secretly despise in each other. Just marking time until the timer says it done and you can pull the cake out, watch it cool, all the time knowing it is going to taste like shit.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. My mom gave me a Bible and I carried it with me everywhere, especially in those early days after the sky fell down. But I never read it. Mom read it all the time and it never did her any good. The sky fell and she got crushed. She didn’t even try to hide. She just stood there and watched the collapse.

I think she wanted it to happen. That’s my problem with most of the Bible people. They didn’t really try to make things better. They just kept walking around with their eyes watching the clouds, waiting for the promised things to fall out so they could stop pretending so hard to care.

This is bleak. I don’t mean it that way. I’m a good person, I think. I try to keep a positive attitude. I haven’t had to kill anybody. Yet. There was that one guy I had to lock in the attic but I’m pretty sure he would have killed me and probably eaten me. He looked so hungry.

I should say a thing or two about hunger. Hunger is pain. Hunger is life. There is something my high school math teacher used to say about transitive property. You can probably work that one out.

I’m not a negative person. I like to stay on the bright side of things. Except sometimes there is no bright side and you just need to stay quiet.

I like people. In some other life, I could have been a sales person. Or a teacher. They are the same kind of thing, you know.

I should probably tell you about the day the sky fell. Or, as they would say it in whatever history books get written, The Day the Sky Fell.

That’s a joke. The part about history books. No one is going to write any history books. History is finished. Everything from now on is just one long day.

And that’s what I want you to know about Life After the Sky Fell. It is tedious. It is boring. It is all just One Really Long Day.

I was going to tell you about the day the sky fell but what’s the sense in that? You’ll just read it and wonder what’s the sky thing anyway. Besides, its pretty boring. The sky was there, up top where it belonged and then there was a huge noise, the sound of metal bending and it was so loud and so strong that it made us vomit and cry. And those who were fast enough and small enough ran and hid in the small, private places under rocks, inside trees, the basement of the earth. And everyone else, like my mom, just stood outside and watched it all happen.

No point in really talking about that.

So, I should probably tell you about the thing that happened the week before. That’s where my mind goes when I think about the end of the world. The Saturday morning my dad called to say he was coming to visit and could I make a place for him to stay for a few days. I said yes. Of course. My dad is a neat freak and always brings his own groceries. Except this time he didn’t and he was an actual awful mess. His clothes were wrinkled and grubby. His hair unkempt. And there was a light inside his eyes that wasn’t tied to anything else inside of him.

“I’ve seen something I cannot explain,” he told me. Those were the words that brought to me the End of the World. It was a prophecy in reverse. Useless to prevent what followed, but maybe what gave me that head start I needed when the main beams of the universe cracked and the whole entire sandwich collapsed.

The night before my eleventh birthday my older brother beat me with a broom stick. My mother was still working three jobs then and was working second and third shift, which meant there was no one to notice, no one to tell. It was just as well. Mother was always so tired and, though it would hurt her now to admit it, she often needed us kids to pretend things were better than they actually were. It was the way we got through life. Pretending and not telling each other about the things over which we had no control.

We had been playing Go Fish, my brother and I, and I asked him if he had any twos and, instead of saying “Go fish” the way you usually do, his face went all still and weird, and he said, “Go to hell,” and cracked me with the broomstick, the nearest thing he could grab, until the broom stick actually broke and my guts felt bruised and busted and completely mashed up inside.

I tried not to cry. I was already old enough to know that crying never makes things go easier, the way bleeding never makes a hungry wolf’s meal die any faster or better. But it is a hard thing to do when you are eleven and you are trapped inside an apartment living room with a psychopath who is also your brother and is who is also the person who is supposed to be watching you.

And it was harder also because I was scared. This was a new kind of thing. My brother had beaten me before. He had twisted my arm until I begged for mercy. He had punched me in my breasts and pulled my hair, but he had never hit me so hard with a stick before. And it was awful, the heavy, thick lash of it already raising bruises like giant fingers on my skin.

And it was hard also because his face had gotten so awful. So still. So quiet. Not my brother’s face at all but a mask like one of those guys in the movies mom never let me watch. The guys who moved with long knives through dark shadows.

I hated crying. I hated seeing the shifting medley of joy and contempt on my brother’s face. And because I could not look at him seeing me like this, I looked down at the scatter of cards on the ground. The hands we had played fanned out like twisted rainbows. There were several twos in his hard of cards. And then, the Queen of Spades and I discovered the thing that would forever change my life. I realized I could pretend my brother was not alive, that he did not exist, and if I wanted it badly and pretended hard enough, it could be true. My brother could disappear. He could no longer exist for me.

And that is the moment I gained control of my whole life. I closed my eyes, fixed my mind and when I opened my eyes again, my brother had vanished. I made my brother a ghost.

Prompt: “To Bring You My Love” by PJ Harvey

When Sebastian severed his wings and put on the boots of the earth-bound mortal, he had never even once considered the possibility that Lana might not reciprocate his love. Sebastian had given everything, forsworn heaven, broken the sacred oath of the host, bound his wings, watched them packed in liniment and placed, still bleeding, inside a box filled with salt and sawdust. And how the blood drenched the sawdust and continued bleeding for days after they had been cut. The magic draining out of them only slowly as Sebastian gathered himself for the mundane routines of mortal kind.

His mother wept. His father cursed his name so inventively and with such vehemence that spawned thirteen deadly hurricanes that careened through heaven, tearing through the streets of gold, bouncing like pinball bumpers.

It had been an easy choice, made heedlessly, without regard for consequence or repercussion.

“She cannot love you,” Sabastian’s mother warned him. “She is not capable.”

Sebastian’s father cursing in new languages that made the cherubs blush with modesty in its blue glare.

“She can. She will,” Sebastian told them.

His grandmother weeping openly, her tears stacking up in great sheets of water, though their kind wept only once in a millennia. A thousand years’ worth of tears spilling out while Sebastian’s grandfather punched the ground and crushed rocks with his bare hands.

“This is folly,” Sebastian’s mother warned him, but it was already too late. His mind was set. His future cast. His eyes bent low to find his lover where she stood working on the earth, oblivious to the turmoil and perdition her beauty and grace had enticed.

It was a mad season in heaven. It was not often done, this thing that Sebastian was choosing. Lucifer Morningstar had done it thousands of years before, taking a small army with him, precipitating a cold war that never seemed to end. A few others had willingly fallen since, but only a few and their names were never spoken and were expunged promptly and utterly from the Book of Life.

It was a hard thing for parents to understand, let alone accept. Sebastian had not expected his Fall to go easily, but he had not prepared himself for the violence of the actual expulsion.

“If you leave, you are cursed. You will be cast down to touch the earth. Your earth will claim you as your new home. It will pull you constantly downward though your spirit will ache for flight. Once your feet touch dirt, they will never again leave that place. Boots will be your destiny. Boots, hardship, limit and bitter dirt. You will cry out for us and we will ignore your pleas. We will make ourselves deaf to your suffering. Your disappointment will know no limit until your corrupted flesh melts and confines you to the dust and dirt which we despise.”

There was a silence while Sebastian considered all of these things. Lana. The corruptible flesh. The consignment to dirt.

“Is this what you truly want?” his grandmother asked. “Can this be what you truly want?”

“It is.” Sebastian spoke with the calm confidence of youth. Arrogance. Upbraided.

And then, his father rushing at him with a host of thousands, pushing him out of the house, through the streets, backward, bruising and crushing, their punishing hands grasping him, lifting him rudely, turning him around and then tossing him down into the sky which was the symbol of all corruptible beings’ aspirations. They looked up as they worked, as they sweated and grunted and toiled. They worshipped the mystery of sky as if it were a limitless, edgeless thing, never knowing, as Sebastian learned how small and shallow and thin the sky really was.

And as he plummeted toward earth, trying not to flap his arms like some ridiculous strange bird, he thought only of Lana and how overcome she would be at this tremendous price he had paid to be with her and how she could do nothing else but accept him into her arms and welcome him into her life as partner, lover and friend.