Changing Seasons

Here it is, my first short story, titled Changing Seasons.  Beware; it's somewhat disturbing, and more than a little strange.  Read at your own risk.  Contains swearing and some sexual content.


Spring is coming, I thought, looking at the small green buds.  The old blind lady said that spring is coming and that things are coming back to life.  And she had said something else, too; she had said, one hundred billion.  And then she had smiled.

     I was in world history, staring out the window at the skeletal trees which were just beginning to bloom.  It was early March, two months before I would graduate and be done with high school forever.  The class, all seniors, was discussing our final project, a thesis on one trend of humanity throughout our time as a species.  It was a culminating project, drawing on years of study.

     "What about you, Julian?" Ms. Rodriguez asked, looking at me.  "You've been quiet."

     I looked up.  "Me?  I was thinking about doing fire, actually."

     A couple of the other students made contemplative noises.  "Fire?  That's interesting."  She smiled.  Ms. Rodriguez was young and pretty, but not in a glamorous way, and I didn't know a single straight high school guy who hadn't spent a few months sick with puppy love over her.  "Care to explain?"

     "Well, we're the only species to have ever used fire, aren't we?  And whether it's wood or coal or gasoline, burning hydrocarbons is our main source of energy.  It's what allows us to build tools and machines that are powered independently, instead of having to rely on human power."

     She nodded.  "So, in effect, you're arguing that fire is a core part of our evolution as a species?"

     "Mhm."  Dayna Jones, a beautiful, pale girl with black hair, was looking at me with a brilliant smile.  I decided to go a step further.  "In fact, I think it's what was responsible for our evolution, not just as a species, but as a society.  It is the difference between us and the rest of life on Earth.  I mean, there are gorillas with language and birds with tools and bats who have oral sex, but who else uses fire?"

     "Well, some plants do."  It was Dayna this time.  That girl was bright, one of the smartest in the grade.  And she wasn't some nerd who spent her spare time reading encyclopedias, she was just an ordinary girl.  The difference was that she thought about things, instead of just reacting, like so many other high schoolers.  "Like, most forests will use brush fires to clear out weeds and smaller trees, in order to give the large trees room to grow, because the large trees can drop seeds further away and are more secure."

     Will you go to prom with me?  I didn't ask.  She was still smiling, though there was challenge in her eyes.  

     "Well, I suppose.  But they don't really use fire, do they?  I mean, they have no control over it, no more than they can control when it rains, or when frosts start happening."  Still, I wondered.  It wasn't like early man just pulled fire out of his asshole, it had to come from somewhere.  And brush fires seemed pretty damn likely.  There was an interesting connection there, one that I would have to look at later.

     "Good point", she said.

     Eighteen days till prom, my mind spat out.

     Shut up, she's probably already been asked.  She's hot enough.

     You know she hasn't.

     It's senior year.

     All the more reason to.

     "And what about you, Logan?"  Ms. Rodriguez asked.  "Any ideas yet?"  Logan had sat next to me all year.  We got along okay.  He was an interesting guy, if not overly smart.

     "Well, I was thinking about, you know, how we bury our dead.  'Cause it's interesting, you get me?  The Chinese would put 'em in their wall, and during the black plague the Europeans had to throw them into huge pits and burn them.  But now, there are funeral homes for pets and shit - sorry, - but there are places where you can get a professional funeral for your dog or cat or bird or whatever.  I guess just because we can afford to.  You get what I'm saying?"

     Ms. Rodriguez nodded.  "Good, Logan.  And you're certainly right, no matter how and why we do it, burying the dead is a uniquely human instinct."

     Someone mused idly.  "I wonder, how many people have been buried?  Like, ever, in the history of humans."

     Ms. Rodriguez looked around.  "Can anyone answer that?"

     It was Dayna who spoke up, again.  "I read somewhere that an estimated 106 billion people have ever lived.  I don't know when that was calculated, but it was somewhat recently.  So...what, a hundred billion?"

     No.  No, definitely a coincidence.

    "That statistic was created in 2002, eleven years ago.  You’d assume that the statistic has gone up since then, but it’s actually stayed about the same, maybe gone up a little, as we learned more about our past.”

     Logan whistled.  “That’s a lotta stiffs.”

     The rest of the day was mainly characterized by my decision to ask Dayna to prom, and subsequently not doing it.  I went home dejected, (and to be totally honest, a tiny bit relieved) and listened to politicians talking about the oil embargo that had started in January.  2013, what a year.  Dad walked in and put in his two cents; “Thank God for electric cars.”  My sister, who was sitting on the stairs and reading the obituaries while waiting for her black nail polish to dry, was a bit more eloquent.

     “Don’t you see how pointless it all is, Bro?  They just talk and talk and talk.  You know who could have actually solved this?  Lincoln.  Or Ben Franklin.  They’re dead.”

     I sighed.  That was the new American girl for you.

     “Oh, look.  This lovely young man worked at a shelter for battered women.  I wonder how many of them he groped up during their little ‘therapy’ sessions?”

     “Alice, shut up!”

     “I’m guessing four, at least.  The people who write obituaries are so hypocritical, you’d think this guy shit diamonds out of a – “

     “Alice!  Jesus, can’t you stop being so morbid for two goddamn seconds?”

     She laughed.  It had a forced cynicism to it that was incredibly annoying.  “You gotta face the facts, Bro.  Everyone dies, alone, and ignoring it doesn’t do you any good.”  It was just too much.  I got up, turned off the TV, and stalked up the stairs to my room. 

     “And you used to be so sweet,” I grumbled as I passed her.  For the past four months she had been like this, sullen and cynical and self-obsessed.  It was getting to the point where I wasn’t sure it was even an improvement on the scared, gothic-religious person she had been the year before.  Then December 2012 happened, and I guess she just took it personally when the world decided not to end, and screw all her preparations.

     I opened my door and there she was, hunched over in a rainbow shawl, her eyes cloudy orbs that were not quite pointed at anything at all.

     “Not ending, Julian, no.  It’s just beginning; it’s the long, long winter that’s ending, after all this time.”   Her face was a mask of twitching, wrinkled skin.  The kind of face that seemed to be made to smile, that fell into place and let sunlight through when the smile came.

     But she wasn’t smiling now.

     “Hello?”  I whispered.  “What are you doing here?”  A little louder; “Hello?  I saw you this morning.  You said spring was coming.  And

(one hundred)

something else, I can’t remember…”  I blinked, and she was gone.  I blinked again.

     What?

     She was there, and then she wasn’t.  Had she ever been there at all?  Was it an extreme symptom of senioritis, or was I going crazy?

     “Talking to yourself, Bro?” the amused voice drifted up the stairs.

     Goddamn, I thought, saying nothing. 

   The old blind lady appeared to me one last time, proving that she had never appeared at all.  It was that night, in a dream I could only remember in disconnected flashes the next morning.  There was a rose, I remember that, a rose that kept sprouting, blossoming, and dying over and over again.  There was the old lady rocking in a chair that wasn’t there, or maybe invisible, hanging in a blue void.  She had a smile on her face, a comfortable grandma-grin.  She said, of course I’m not real, silly.  Check the papers!  Then after that, or maybe before, she wasn’t smiling at all.  She had a face made of stone and a voice like gravel, and she said spring is coming again.  Behind her, the earth roiled and waved, like a stormy sea.  Then there was a voice, screeching over the sound of distorted guitar, and that wasn’t part of the dream, it was my alarm clock and for a while I forgot all about the dream, focused on such early-morning difficulties as walking, seeing, and not falling asleep in the shower.  I grabbed a Clif bar, and went out to my car.  I listened to the radio until 6:44, and then cursed and went back into the house.

     “Alice!”  I called.  I could hear the shower running upstairs, so I walked up to the closed door.

     “I’m leaving in five minutes, with or without you.  Got it?”

     “Meh.”  It was about all the answer I could expect to get at this time in the morning, so I walked back down the stairs into the living room.   There was a newspaper sitting on the table.  I almost walked past it, but then I saw the front cover.  It was the one Alice had been reading yesterday, I hadn’t looked at it yet.  The cover story stopped me dead.

     Of course I’m not real, silly.  Check the papers!

     There she was, hunched over and malevolent, chalky eyes, a shawl around her shoulders that you could tell was rainbow even in the black and white photo.  BLIND TEACHER KILLED IN SHOOTING, POSSIBLY GANG WARFARE, read the headline.  I scanned the article.  She taught at a school for the blind.  Monday morning she had been found dead in an alley three miles from her home.

     And I had seen her Thursday morning.

     Dear God, I thought.  I’m going insane.  I kinda figured Alice would be the one to go, but I guess the joke’s on me, huh?  I laughed.  It was not a good sound.  Was I seeing things?  And what on earth was happening if I wasn’t?  If she was actually there?  Sir Doyle ran through my mind; when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,

     I had always stayed away from drugs, alcohol, all that.  And I had always been able to trust my own eyes.  I had a 33 on the ACT, dammit, and I would figure this out.

     But my time had run out.  Time had run out for all of us.

    

     Plants move so slowly as to be unnoticeable to living things, but to them we must look like beams of light, moving at speeds that turn solid objects into blurs.  I was in history when the seasons began to change, and though the winter was long, spring was over in minutes.  Unlike plants, though, we could not keep up with the change.  We were not evergreens, weathering any conditions, rather, we were flakes of snow; beautiful, but ephemeral in the cruel fires of life.

     Ms. Rodriguez was explaining proper MLA citation.  I was agonizing over Dayna, watching the blackboard idly when it began to move.  I think I was the first one who saw it, though it’s possible someone else had and not reacted.  The letters she had written started to shift, stretching in towards the center, which began to bulge.  A girl in the first row raised a trembling finger towards it.

     Then everything was moving.  The thin carpet which covered the floor was melting into a slick, trembling plastic, the ceiling tiles bulging inwards and outwards, like the bottoms of trampolines.  A face had emerged from the blackboard, which was now totally gone around the corners, and began to spin to unnatural degrees, like a hand on a lunatic clock.  Its eyes were solid white chalk.  I saw the glass in the windows melt and run it glittering, clear streams across the roiling floor and underneath the door, which was twisting itself into thin, knotty limbs that had too many joints.  The air seemed to freeze; my skin broke out in goosebumps and I could see my breath, or was that just my vision fogging over?  My chair collapsed; not in the way you might expect a chair to collapse, but the way you might expect an octopus masquerading as a chair to move if it suddenly grew bored of its disguise.  My shirt began to unravel, threads wriggling down my legs like tiny white worms.

     Perhaps all these things were making noise, but if so, I couldn’t hear it over the screams of my classmates.  I took a moment to listen, and beyond the screams of the other kids, I heard the screams of the school.  And beyond that, a ringing air-raid siren that was the screams of an entire world.

     Standing up was like trying to stand on the deck of a ship which was floating on rough seas of reality, instead of water.  The world reeled and rolled around me.  The thing coming out of the blackboard was now to its’ waist; it was a woman, matte black stone breasts wobbling obscenely, distorted white letters crossing them.

     “WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?”  screamed a girl right next to me, loud enough to make me bring a hand up to my ear.  I looked down to see a shape a bit like a paramecium drifting across the floor to the corner, where other shapes were gathered.  That’s my shirt, I realized.  The other cottony bacteria were building themselves into a pair of rainbow-pixellated legs, I watched as mine swarmed up one and began to weave itself into the things side. 

     I stumbled forwards, making for the window.  In front of me, Logan was engaged in a fistfight with a creature that was half-man, half-desk; perfectly flat, rectangular torso and a malformed head shaped from right angles.  “MOTHERFUCKER!”  He screamed.  The desk laughed, shook, and sprouted two heavy wooden arms and a massive penis, jutting out at a perfect ninety-degree angle.  Logan yelled again, swinging his arms, terror on his face.  “Holy shit holy shit you’re a Fucking Desk what the fuck is this”

     I took a few more steps across the floor that was now down to concrete; the carpet had assembled into a portly, smiling bald man in the center of the room.  Dayna was screaming, hunched over with her arms around her head, and at that moment the floor heaved and flung me into her.  She screamed again, tensing.

     “Oh God, oh god Julian what is going on?  I don’t know what’s happening, the the the windows ran right over my shoe and the legs of my desk fucking they they oh shit oh shit oh shit-“  She was naked, I noticed, except for a veil-like blue fluff around her hips, which was rapidly coming apart.  Of all the times, I thought, hysterically exasperated, it had to be now.  Not in the back of my car prom night, but now.  ‘Cause now it’s not even distracting, I could care less.

     Amazing how our priorities change when reality begins to fall apart.

     I grabbed her shoulder and she flung her arms around me, her words turning to tears which began to run with a vengeance.  I had a lump in my throat, but no tears.  I suppose my body wanted me to see what was happening, every little detail of it.  I watched as the walls began to retract in on themselves, the way paper curls and disintegrates when it burns.

     I just held her there, for a while.  From the time the blackboards started to move to the moment I stumbled into Dayna, I had taken four steps.  Perhaps seven seconds had passed.

     “What the fuck is happening?” she muttered through her tears.

(spring is here)

     “I don’t know, Day.  I don’t know.  I want to look out the window.”

     She opened her mouth, and I was afraid she was about to collapse, but then she shut it with a snap.  Her eyes took on a hard glint, and I was glad; something as simple as walking to a window had become a step into hell, and one I may not have been able to take alone.

     Combined, we made it two steps.  Then a figure like some mutant, albino spider-monkey dropped down from the ceiling, throwing off a cloud of chalky powder as it landed.  Both of us screamed, pulling each other close, but before my eyes shut I saw a face that should never have existed; white, pupil-less eyes beneath a bald scalp, and a too-wide, lunatic grin that literally stretched from ear to ear.

     We took a couple of hasty, shuddering breaths and looked at each other.  The white dusty thing had already loped away.  “Ceiling tiles,” she muttered.  “It was made from the ceiling tiles, oh, ha ha ha, how clever.”  Her eyes, suddenly, strikingly blue, still had that hard glint, but I could see insanity dancing behind them, not far from the surface.  I recognized it, because it was behind my eyes too, trampling through my skull.  We took a couple more steps forward and reached the empty window-frame, which was widening and the walls melted away in all directions.  What I saw was beyond comprehension.

     The ground was a boiling sea of humanoid shapes blended into some elemental, demented orgy.  Dirt, grass, and concrete flowed like water, rising into columns that then refined themselves into shapes, the shapes of people, people in an endless sea, people made of earth, stretching into the maddening distance to the horizon where all I could see was movement, the very skin of the planet roiling like water about to boil.  Buildings were working themselves apart piece by piece, each piece its own organism; some glass, some metal, some plastic.  Trees bent and shook, their limbs shrinking back into their trunks, which sprouted new, jointed limbs that moved.  Now I could hear it, the noise of a planet tearing itself apart, counterpointed perfectly by the hellish screams which rent the freezing air.

     I just stood there, unable to move.  My jeans disintegrated and all the elastic flowed out of my shorts, I didn’t even notice.  The walls receded, opening up new vistas of horror.  Eventually, after some unit of time that was immeasurable except in the sense that it was far too long, I turned to Dayna.

     “Dayna,” I said in a cracking voice. “Day, we…”

     She was looking out the window, eyes glazed, mouth open.  Her face was pale and sheened with sweat.  No, no you have to stay with me, I thought desperately.  “Dayna!” I cried.  “Please look at me, don’t leave me, don’t.”

     She looked over at me, away from the terrible window.  “This is the end, isn’t it?” she said, her voice wrought with pain and dreamy wonder.  “The end of the world.”

     A voice rose in my head, unwanted and unbidden: “not ending, Julian, no.  It’s just beginning,” and I pushed it away.  “Dayna”, I heard myself say.  “Day, I – “  I what?  What do you say as the world dies around you?  I love you?  I’m sorry?  I never got to ask you to prom?  What human statement, human emotion, could possibly hold the slightest candle to this level of chaos and destruction?

     She smiled at me, a smile full of pain and fear and love and kindness.  “It’s okay,” she whispered.  “It’s all right, everything is all right.”  And the very untruthfulness of that, the willful ignorance and hope against hope brought tears to my eyes for the first time that day.  I pulled her close and kissed her, losing myself in her smell, her taste, knowing fully in that eternal moment that I might never experience it again.  Her skin was soft under my hands, a shiver twitched down my body in a wave as her fingers curled against my back.

     It was a desperate, frightened kiss, the dying expression of a future full of love and sex and longing that would no longer happen, but there was a certain elegance to it, a pagan grace that echoed back to the dawn of humanity.  Such words may sound melodramatic, but I assure you that in the context of such a cataclysm, they were not.  We stood there for perhaps minutes, lost in the only thing that seemed to matter anymore.

     Then a pair of hands took my shoulders and wrenched me backwards, hands that were cold and smooth and completely unyielding.  I shouted and almost fell over, the hands kept me up.  Dayna reached out towards me, eyes still closed, and then a pair of hands grabbed her, too.  She shrieked, and I’m proud to say she fought where I could only stop and stare.  I watched her body twist, sinuous and smooth, and wondered how there could have been a time when there was something more interesting to me than her body.  Suddenly furious, I swung an elbow back into my captor.  It was like striking a brick wall, pain flared down my arm.  I was knocked off balance as the hands spun me around, I made a half-circle and the caught me cruelly, snapping my right collarbone.  Glassy, sickening pain rolled through my side.

     I was staring into a face made of wood, with dark green chlorophyll eyes that burned with ancient wisdom and fury.  He(it?) had small, wriggling roots where his teeth should have been, and when he breathed, the breath was cool, redolent of underground caves full of mushrooms, with tree roots hanging down from the ceiling like stalactites.

     “Why have you forsaken us?” he said in a voice so low it made my stomach hurt.  “Why did you not prepare for our coming?”

     “Please,” I said, words slurred with pain.  “I don’t know who you are, I never did anything to you, I’m only eighteen.”

     “Ha!”  He spat a lump of dirt out, it crumbled against my chest.  “I am Patrick Sleator, and I died in 1906.  Today I rise, to find myself forgotten?  I rise to find my body destroyed, my tombstone worn away?!?”

     “Why are you here?” I sobbed.  “Why are you doing this?”

     “BECAUSE WINTER IS OVER.”  The words came simultaneously from the dozens of humanoid shapes around us, our classroom broken down into its separate elements and reanimated in wood, in stone, in chalky ceiling-tiles.

     And then I understood.  I understood everything; for some reason, I had been warned.  One hundred billion, she had said.  One hundred billion people, blooming again in the light of spring.  And they told us the world would never end.  Ha!

     And I had been warned.  I had been warned, and the thing which finally broke me was not the apocalypse, or the gruesome and wholly accidental murder of Dayna some three minutes later, but that looming, insurmountable question: why had I been warned?  What might I have been able to do, if I had figured it out?

      Reason tells me I couldn’t have stopped it.  The changing seasons do not wait on mere mortals.  And perhaps even if I could have, maybe it was better I didn’t.  I never fully understood what happened that day, not up until the very end, but the mere scale of it dwarfed our very existence.  This was no gothic novel or adventure movie, there was no sacred shrine or cosmic door that could prevent this, nothing at all.  But the strength and decency of my spirit came at a cost, and there is no worse torture than the what-ifs and could-haves of a world that never was, the endless screams of a life lost to time echoing back across the walking wastelands.