The End Of All Things

Short prose fiction

Somewhere, out in the dark, a man cried out. A hollow cry that rang loud and hard with a childhood spent unloved, and 4am searching. She lay there in the cold white sheets, awake and wondering if she was the only one listening.

Help me, the voice cried. Won’t someone help me. Help me.

The grown man begged to the empty streets below, his voice slurred with ethanol and lost teeth. He was a perpetual child, like her, forever lonely and searching the wide veins of the city for someone to steer the sails away from the storms of instability. In search of a grown up who loved them. A grown up, a grown up who knew how to navigate the dark uncertainties of grief, loss, love, hope, and sadness. A grown up who held you when the night closed in and the streets were sharp with silence. The only difference, she thought, listening to that gull like call, between her and him was that she had another man’s walls around her. For now. She reached out and kissed the cold smooth shoulders of her lover. He didn’t stir. He was deep in slumber, undreaming, thick with adult concerns and grown up problems, untroubled by the philosophies of late night waking. A man with few words, and many answers. A rock in the curdling waves of a tempest she didn’t understand. She pressed her lips to him again, drinking in the memory of his body, his shape, his…