This kind of feels like shouting to an empty room right now, so I'll keep it brief. This is my first post, and I'd like it to set a precedent. I'll be using this blog as a way to get my writing out in the world, to get some interested fans perhaps, and hopefully some good critics as well. I'll often be posting story fragments, to see if there is interest, and to gauge where my direction should be.
For my first post though, I choose... why, the first short story I ever wrote. It may not be the best way to say hello to the intertubes, but it seems like a logical starting point.
Enjoy.
The Lastborn
Droi sat in the rain with the mountain. Neither spoke. Droi squinted to avoid the big drops handed down by the branches above him and kept his eyes focused on the summit. He drank from a stream that chattered busily about its business of carrying fish and glinting bits of mountain. They waited this way while the clouds moved off to rumble closer to the horizon; mountains have no cause to talk to anyone; they only do what mountains should, geologically speaking.
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A brief explanation: Denver huddles below the Rockies, about twenty years ago. The winter sky was blue-grey, then pink, then orange and black with night and lights. A man and woman meet at a bar, and free with drinks, move across the street. They run between waves of headlights, pour in the hotel door, slosh through the musty lobby, and wake up in the morning with headaches and dry-heaves. He leaves while she is in the bathroom. Nine months later is The End.
The End is Droi. It could not be simpler, but hearing about The End before The End bears explaining, and capitalization: Big T, big E. The Earth said “Enough.” And it was.
A late summer thunderstorm crashed outside the hospital the night Droi was born. He was delivered into darkness, with the booming of nature above, and everyone followed him there.
All cars stopped. Some crashed, more where it was night, but most coasted to a confused stop. Every bit of technology quit. Some people were trapped in awkward places –- elevators, submarines, planes, trains -- and most were allowed to surface or ground before those things stopped forever.
Waterwheels sluiced and firewood crackled -- the pinnacle of technology thereafter.
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Nineteen years the world spun, as the mountains moved about and tried to make it right again. Cities were the worst place to be. There was a caring brand of wrath visited on the scared masses of people in cities. Many cities are in the shadow of a mountain, and every city disappeared quickly.
Over a quiet Los Angeles, quiet because guns stopped working, and because things that should explode or burn refused to do so, Mount Whitney stood up with nothing like the form of a human and everything like the form of a mountain that just stood up, and spoke to the people. It said, in tones of gentle earthquakes (because it could, and it was careful) that they should seek homes elsewhere, in places that could take their presence and feel no harm for it. No one was deafened by the words, but a mountain spoke, the air and earth graciously moved, and the command passed to every single human.
Mount Whitney sighed with relief as it began to push out over the nearly endless housing developments, industrial complexes, and the worst –- the deepest scars –- the freeways. All mountains took more time and crushed with greater might as they cleared the tangle of roads and cars spider-webbing the world.
The Worcestershire Beacon, a particularly nice and talkative mountain in Western England, small enough to hear people shout, gave the mountain’s point of view on The End. In the intervening years between then and now it passed to Droi’s ears, and he thought of it as he waited.
The Earth and the entire Universe in general acts as a whole because the parts listen. Most parts, being parts, have no choice, and that extends to every scrap of life except humans. The Earth tried to say without speaking that humans were ruining themselves and everything around them at an alarming rate. Things that could never be recovered were being destroyed, and things that should never be thought of were being created and distributed en-masse. From extinction to deforestation, from cars to nuclear weapons, humans were blindly playing leapfrog with disaster, and disaster was up next, aiming to jump low.
Unknown to us though, the law of conservation of energy is not the only one concerning conservation, and all the laws work together. While a few billion cubic miles of dark matter drifting in a very lonely part of space disappeared, the Earth stopped everything humans were doing beyond technology using natural occurrences (this could be argued, but for lack of a complete definition, The End covered anything that was causing a problem, including the production of humans), while mountains got up, spoke to people in real voices, and moved around crushing and burying the wounds. No one was born after Droi, the seven-billionth, the last.
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POST REMAINDER REMOVED, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT IF YOU WOULD LIKE AN ELECTRONIC COPY OF THIS STORY. THANKS! -A
