Final Movement

A short-story on societal despair; a despair with a remedy.

Her backbone dug into her bed’s wooden frame, her tailbone into the hardwood of the floor. It was the dull kinda pain that didn’t kill but didn’t go away either. She didn’t care anymore, anyways. That was the real tragedy, I guess. The sole occupant of her attention was a spider clinging to the frame of her vanity.

She didn’t gaze outta fear or disgust, just outta jealousy: its legs moved in its hideous dance while she couldn’t move at all. Her legs were asleep, you understand. She hadn’t moved for hours; she didn’t have the strength to. Her limbs were heavy even though she was so wispy and thin. She hadn’t eaten in days, hadn’t slept either. She didn’t care anymore.

It was all ending, anyway. Her mind was made up.

Outside of her window drummed the constant downpour of rain against the fire-escape stairway that snaked the side of the building. And far below, in the streets of the storming twilight city, fear and fire raged.

She’d seen the news, after all. That big chapel had burned to the ground, and folks took that as their chance to show how much they really didn’t care anyway. Crowds upon crowds rallied to put their stake down on the real issues. Riots had broken out.

So she sat, watching the spider, listening to car horns sound like the end-time trumpets, to the rain beat down like the drums of judgment, and to the cries of one-hundred-thousand angry folks who didn’t care that the world was ending. Her world, at least.

Hopeless indifference had overtaken her, the same that had overtaken most of the world up to that point. Now it had finally boiled over. She let her head fall back onto the cushion of her disheveled mess of a bed, and she listened.

“…it’s really pathetic.” The tone was harsh; it was her mother’s boyfriend. Third boyfriend. “I can’t--Michelle, wait!” There was a thud. “I can’t depend on you for anything, anymore. You don’t take care of the house, yourself, or even that little demon of a girl! Listen, plea--hey!” There was another thud, and then silence. Her mother shouted something incomprehensible, too muffled in the other room. “I’m done, Michelle,” the boyfriend said, finally.

There was a door’s slam. Things just didn’t really go well, I guess. Not anymore. The girl heard her mother storming around the wreck of their apartment.

Then silence, aside from the distant drums, the faraway trumpets, and the cries of one-hundred-thousand people too angry to realize the damage they’d dealt.

She was done, too. I hate that she’d reached that point, I really do. There were so many truths, so many revelations that she’d missed, things that’d left her without meaning, without hope. Broken. She’d been done for weeks and weeks now, but only now had her spark begun to sputter.

It all seemed like a horrible nightmare. The chaos of the far-below streets, the third time she’d been left by any sort of a father figure, and then the haze. Her bedroom was so hazy that made it look like the clouds had seeped through the window. It was smoke from her mother and the other distasteful folk that’d shared the apartment.

In the haze it was hard for the girl to see, speaking nothing of the darkness. Her light-bulbs had died months ago, and they hadn’t bought new ones. The room was lit only by the dreary blue outside the window.

The smoke did sting the girl’s eyes, but she didn’t care, and she shed no tears. She was passed that.

You might’ve been there once. There’s a real, real terrible place in folk’s lives when even tears won’t have sympathy for you. I’ve been there before, seen it too many times to count. It’s that moment when the spark reaches its dimmest, you understand.

Through the smeared picture of the haze she looked about herself, moving the way you might move underwater. She looked at the vanity where the spider’d been. It was still there weaving its web in mockery of her stillness, but she was looking past the arachnid.

Of note were two things that the girl gazed at: the vanity, a fixture so beautifully made; and an old, outgrown, worn out pair of ballet shoes.

If anything would’ve brought tears to her eyes, it was those shoes. For a brief, hopeful moment she thought back to the good she’d seen, the happiness she’d experienced. But that was long ago. She couldn’t dance when her spark had dimmed like that.

She studied the vanity for a moment longer, and she thought something was wrong. She couldn’t make out what, but the whole thing was wrong. It was beautiful, but the haze made it too difficult to see what was wrong with it. She’d not forgotten, simply buried it in her own haze.

Next of interest was the window. The drums had grown louder, the rain harder; the trumpets more frequent, forewarning an impending disaster, maybe. She hated it all. She wished she could break the glass, she wished that she could light a match and burn it all, building by building. She wished--

Well, she wished a lot of things, you understand. She didn’t will any.

She’d been put under too many times, I suppose. Ignored too often by the right folks and accosted too often by the wrong ones. And she’d never been told that there was hope.

Her lips quivered, though no tears accompanied that. She didn’t deserve it, really. She was too young for that spark to sputter like that. But sputter it did, in its death throes, its final movement.

Whether you can explain it away or not, there’s a spark in every heart. Every spark comes from a source, you understand, be that divine or subconscious. But every spark dies, too. And some sparks sooner than others.

Her eyes opened; she hadn’t realized they’d fallen shut. The spider’s movement still mocked her, the arachnid weaving its web as if to challenge a god’s own weave. She looked at the ballet shoes, and for a moment she thought, Maybe… then she saw the vanity, and discerned a part of its wrongness: its mirror was cracked in the corner. There’s no going back, she thought. It was the clearest thought she’d had in weeks.

And so the spark sputtered. The girl made her penultimate movement.

Though starving, and though delirious, she moved. Her eyes were heavy and swollen, and though she would’ve liked to rub them, she didn’t have the strength to raise her arms too far. Her knees shook to support her light weight.

She reached the window, leaned her weight against it. She looked out over the city, watching the calamity as it unfolded. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic and every horn rang clear and true like that final and ominous judgment. Fires roared from the corner stores, unimpaired by the rain. In the distance she could see the rising column of smoke from the chapel that’d burnt.

Pushing and shoving with the last measure of her will, she opened the window. Within a moment, the haze of her bedroom had cleared, and her lungs ached as fresh, damp air filled them.

The girl turned to reexamine her room in the haze’s absence. Looking at the vanity, she was struck by how dreadful it really looked. The fixture had once been beautiful, now she could see it clearly. Its mirror was stained by countless fingerprints, where folks had handled it without care. Too much human grease and muck stained the thing. There was a spiderweb that clung to the bottom corner where the arachnid was moving. Opposite the spider’s web was a spiderweb of cracks. And around the off-white frame the paint’d been chipped and rubbed away by misuse and overuse.

I’m sure you understand. The girl’s own haze had cleared, and she realized the stains on her own vanity. She didn’t care anymore.

It was cruel what the world had done to her. But it was crueler what she was about to do to the world.

She climbed out the window, onto the stairway. She had a birds-eye view of the chaos from there.

The spark reached its throes as she made her final movement. That divine spark, that seed of instinct, whose Will was creation, reached its destruction at last. Soaked to the bone and shivering, hair clinging to her neck like ivy on a wall (or like a stairway on a building’s side) she stood, briefly, tall.

She grabbed the handrail, took a final gaze, inhaled, and then...

There was music.

For a moment, the girl heard the trumpets fade away, and the drums quiet down. She heard the cries become like the fading echo of a bad dream. There was only the music. Strange, something melodious and ethereal, the music droned on. It was a clear, sweet voice. It was the voice of a man, but unlike anything the girl had ever heard from one. There was no harsh strength, no violence, no threat.

It was a voice as gentle as a forest breeze.

She couldn’t tell where it came from, but she couldn’t get the melody out of her head. So she stood still, soaking in the rain, listening. Inside of her heart, that spark began to glow a little brighter.

She was Psyche, and Amor was singing.

Her head shook, though she hadn’t shaken it. Her heavy, soaked hair swayed like a bough in the wind.

To her, the twilight looked different, now. She hadn’t realized how beautiful it was. She became transfixed by the sights and the smells. Rain on asphalt far below, the twinkle of one-hundred windows on the building’s sides like stars in the sky.

She couldn’t help but let her cheeks rise slowly, as she smiled a real and genuine smile, too long overdue.

No longer was it just traffic far below. In the music’s spell it was a river of light, red and white, flowing in the street below. The cars were still, but there was movement all around them, not indifferent stillness. Rain in the puddles, rioters in the streets surrounding, a dance that wouldn’t slow. The horns and the drums became the backdrop for this sweet music dripping like honey to her senses.

Transfixion birthed transfiguration, and the spark burst into a flame within her.

A grin lit her sallow, soaked face, and she felt strong. Her feet began to move, dancing slowly, in rhythm to the song in her heart. She’d not felt like that in years. She glanced into the window, into the clarity of her disorder, and she saw.

The vanity was there, ugly and disfigured. She crawled in, dancing, dancing to the music all the while, and snatched the old ballet shoes before pulling the vanity to a crash on the floor. Out of the window she crawled again, throwing the shoes to the wind, before the reckless excitement seized her.

The spark’s Will was creation; what is movement such as this, if not a state of creation? Of the chaos from within tamed and ordered into a movement so graceful?

She raced down the stairways, her feet slipping several times on the soaked steps, but her hands clinging tightly to the handrail. Floor after floor she descended towards the trumpets of tribulation, towards the drums of the judgment, towards the cries and the fires of one-hundred-thousand folks in their devilish rage.

Onto the street she stood at last, feet bare and numb, standing in a puddle amidst the chaos of the end-times.

Her final movement blossomed. She danced, without a care in the collapsing world. She danced in the street before one-hundred-thousand folks put in awe of her movement. She danced like there was nothing left in the world, the memories of her own muscles transforming into motion. She danced and the pandemonium stood still.

The spark blazed brighter than ever before. She had tapped into the fount of creation within her, be that divine or subconscious: that ain’t for me to say. Most awe-striking was the smile that lit her radiant face, something transforming her sallow despair into joy.

She was beautiful and she was free. In the spasm of passion she danced, in the flow of creation she entered into her own hereditary godhood, and nothing would challenge her movement.

And the death throes of the world, for that brief moment in time, stood still. The trumpets quieted, the drums faded, the cries silenced in awe.

Its final movement would soon thereafter continue, and the world would end.

 

 

Author's Note

All criticism is welcome, so long as it's constructive.