The Day After Doomsday

A short-story showing a final marriage in the wasteland.

I took her slender and gentle hand in mine, bruised as it may have been. It didn’t bother me; how could it? It was all I’d ever wanted, you know, and I finally had it. My other hand found her waist, delicate and warm to my touch.

Our eyes locked as we began our dance, swaying among the ashen piles, the heaps of burnt timber, the ruin. The cathedral was once great. Now, well. The scent of smoke clung to the air, kicked up with every gentle, dead breeze. Hellfire may have fallen but it couldn’t ever win. The world may have ended, but the cathedral still stood.

In our dance there was an inherent contradiction, every harsh and gentle sway an oxymoron. Both affection and contention was made manifest in our motions. Though we found a rhythm that was harmonious, there was something withheld, something resenting.

“I…” the words stopped in my throat; I knew this was no time nor place for it. “I love you,” I said. The world had ended; what else could be said?

I’d hoped to dispel the spite, but her tears only began to roll down her blemished and lovely cheeks more quickly. They were tears of pain and regret. I hated that it hurt me almost as badly.

The music, which had quieted before then, continued to ring throughout the desolated cathedral. The open halls resounded with something so otherworldly, but neither of us cared where it was coming from. We just danced with one-another. She was the heart and outermost border of my world in one, and I was there only to restore her.

She continued to sob, crying quietly as our feet moved in tandem. Her sorrow didn’t manifest in the movements; her grace was peerless. But she looked away from my gaze with something like shame.

“You shouldn’t love me,” she said at last. Her voice was sweeter than any release, but more bitter than any shame. “I’m not deserving of that kinda love.”

“Nobody is,” I said. I knew it was the wrong time to say that, and I could see the disdain in her face. “No one…” I began, struggling to mend the statement, “no one deserves too much love, y’know. But I can’t help lovin’ you.” I tried to meet her eyes again, but she wouldn’t meet mine. “Your name is always on the tip of my tongue… honey, you’re always on my mind.”

I stopped, fearing that it’d worsen her shame.

The music rang louder, now. You’ve never heard something so divine as that music.

“How?” she asked. “How can you love me with what I’ve done to you?”

Heart in my throat, beating like the drums of war, I fought to voice my feelings.

“There… there ain’t a thing you can do to me that I’ll hold against you. I’ve forgiven you, darlin’. Please, just accept that. Let me love you--”

“I can’t accept your forgiveness,” she spat, pushing me away. She turned her lovely, beaten back on me. She was crestfallen as she walked away from me in the open hall.

But my love was a jealous one.

“Why not?” I demanded, walking after her. I wouldn’t let her live in shame.

Tears rose in my eyes and I struggled in vain to fight them�"they won. I loved the girl more than anything. More than--

More than she could understand, then.

The soles of my shoes had been worn away in the catastrophe, in the events of its fear and its fire. My feet were blistered, but I walked on after her scorned, glorious form. Her hair danced in the gentle breeze that blew the ash up in the open hall. It was the ash of one-hundred thousand men and women lost in the all-consuming flame.

“Why Not?” I demanded. My tone was icy in its impassioned desire.

She shook her head as she walked, though her pace had slowed. Her hair shook with the gesture, with the wind. It waved as if drowned in the ocean; it waved like the flags of one-thousand nations, all caught in a terrible and fiery wind.

As I strode after her my own sight was smeared by the refraction of light in my tears. She’d become something truly ethereal, and the music resounding throughout the wastes only deepened that illusion.

“Darling, I don’t wanna go on without you--” I cried after her, her steps slowing, “I want you.”

And then we stopped, the both of us, in our tracks. There was only the music, the gentle breeze that blew the stench of a dead world, and no talk, no movement. In that moment, we were simply being.

“Then why’d you let me?” she whispered at last, finally turning to me. Her whisper, even over the divine melody, echoed throughout the cathedral’s open halls. She heard her own whisper asking back to her, Why’d you let me?

“’Let you’? Honey, I…”

“How could you let me get so, so lost…?” Her reddened eyes pleaded. She begged an answer, and it was one given too easily.

“It…” I began, shaking my head as tears flowed freely, “it wasn’t my place to make your choices.” I couldn’t bear to look at her pain, not in my own. “That was your choice to make.”

“You could’ve prevented it.” Her eyes, still pleading, like ten-thousand children not understanding their impending end. “You could’ve--”

“I’m here… I’m here, now. Please. Please just accept my…”

“I can’t,” she said.

Then there was that moment’s silence again, an enrapturing stillness, like a fresco of the doomsday gone by.

“Why not, my darling? Why…?”

There was more silence, and it was the silence of one-hundred thousand children lying dead in the wasteland. It was the silence of all those too hopeless and too indifferent to save themselves.

Her eyes fell shut, tears flowing over scarred and perfect cheeks.

“…because I can’t forgive myself,” she finally said, settling gracelessly onto the sooty, ashen stone of the ancient cathedral floor. Her shawl picked up the black of the ash so readily, a shawl adorned with those poor souls lost in the hellfire.

I fell to my knees before her, wrapping my arms around her shoulders gently. I set my chin on her unkempt and glorious hair, and there we wept together.

For so long we sat there that my knees began to ache and bruise. But pain was a small price to pay, comforting and cradling the girl that I loved.

The melody rang throughout the vast, fire-bathed halls of the cathedral. Only the music and the sobbing and the dead wind could be heard in the quiet of the wasteland.

To me it was only her that mattered in those precious moments. She was to me my everything, and I loved her in a way that nobody could’ve ever loved a thing.

Through the gaping mouth of the burnt ceiling, sunlight filled the sanctuary once lit by flame. Where shadows once lurked, now sunlight filled those parts unseen. The sunlight was clear and warm, but not harsh. It was that temperate autumn’s sun when everything has died and has begun its decay, when nothing else remains.

But just as autumn’s death gives way to winter’s ice, and winter’s ice to the new-birth of spring’s noise, so too would the wasteland give way to a new birth. I was sure.

The world may have ended, but I didn’t care. The girl in my arms was the world to me now, and that’s what I knew to be important.

Would that I could’ve comforted her in those days of her unfaithfulness, of her rebellion, of her wayward brokenness--but that was idle wishing. We were passed that, as it was. The stillness of the cathedral was the same stillness of every other man and woman in the wastes, the stillness of every tree forsaken by the dead breeze, the stillness of every fish in every stagnant sea, of every bird in every empty sky.

As I held her in my arms for those precious moments, her cries silenced. She looked up in my embrace and into my eyes, and in that moment’s silence I felt a true peace. It was real, indelible love in her perfect and reddened eyes.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she whispered. “That I turned my back on you… that I… well,” she stopped. I wanted to squeeze her, to lift her in the air, to love her. But I didn’t wanna spoil that tender moment. “I…” our eyes, half-lidded, gazed; our lips, half-open to one-another’s, breathed each other’s air. We were almost… “I love you, too,” she confessed.

Then there was bliss, as lips met in a loving embrace too long overdue. We rose from the soot of the desolation, from the dust of the wasteland with no thoughts, no intents, no plan: only an unbridled love, at last unified.

The world was dead, but together in the wasteland, we became happy, just as we had once been.

After the end of the world we were more alive than ever before it.

 

Author's Note

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