The rain is cold and sharp against my skin, ice seeping through my skin into my bones. It bounces off tarmac and skitters into gutters and drains, and it rolls down my face like tears. Her hair is pressed against her skin, spread out like a spider’s web, and she stands with her face turned towards the sky.
“This,” she tells me, “is the end.”
I look around again. “This? A dirty road in the middle of nowhere?”
She laughs, and it sounds like bells clashing and glass shattering all at once. “Everywhere is the end if you know where to look. How to look.”
“I didn’t realise you took Philosophy in school.”
The smile I get is obviously supposed to convey nothing specific but it feels like there might be an undercurrent of a threat, like someone you recently annoyed showing you their knife collection with the blades pointed towards you for no other reason. “Funny.”
“So why have you brought me here?”
“Because this is the end. I want to show you the end.” And so she reaches for my hand again, and brings me a step forwards.
Now the rain turns to ash coagulating in the droplets still rolling down my skin, and a warmth begins to emanate from in front of me. The road, or more accurately the brush and trees around it, is engulfed in flames.
“This,” she says this time, “is a different end. An end where death reaches out and scrabbles for grip, and vows to take whatever it can with it. This is not a quiet death.”
I look behind me, and see the rain and abandoned road again, devoid of ash and flame. “And what is a quiet death?”
“Slow. No-one realises until the quiet death has gently lifted everyone and everything and snatched them all away.” She is still holding my hand, and her hands are even colder than the ice rain. “These are both the end. The end is infinite. The end is everywhere. Everything is ending, all the time and all at once.”
She keeps walking, pulling me forwards. Every ending flashes past me, swirling, all too fast to catch individually. And then eventually she lets go of my wrist and I realise as I’m falling that she was practically holding me up, and then I’m on my hands and knees in snow.
“This,” she says from where she stands in front of me, her back to me, “is your ending.”
I cough, and blood splatters against the snow, stark and jarring in its contrast. “Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
The sun set a while ago now.
The dim resonance of an out of tune piano filters through the trees and rain, through the smoke and snow, through the ashes and monoxide. And when I look up from the red flower splashed into the snow beneath me, I see my corpse with my back to me, fingers spiralling up and down the keys of a rotting piano.
“Is it true,” I say, my voice rasping like someone’s tearing the inside of my throat open with their own nails, “that every ending is also a beginning?”
“What will begin when you end?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I’m just another body in the pile.”
“Is there anyone left for you?” she says, but it isn’t a question. She knows there’s no-one left now. She knows what I did. “Is there anyone who shall weep over your grave, who will wipe the moss out of your engraved name, who’ll feel a gape in their lives where you once were?”
“There was, once,” I say quietly. “Once.”
“A long time ago,” she says.
“You think I made the wrong choice.”
“You say it like a subjectivity.” She sighs, and twirls her staff in her hand. I’m boring her. “You cannot run from endings forever. You cannot hide forever.”
“I don’t want an ending.”
“I’m not giving you a choice.” The piano speeds up. She walks forwards in the snow, and she doesn’t leave any footsteps. “These endings don’t wait for you to want them.”
“W-Wait.” And I’m cold now. “What kind of death is this?”
She stops.
“You said, all those endings, they were different deaths,” I say. “What sort of death is this?”
She approaches the piano, and my corpse falls from the seat, face mirroring my own. “This,” she says, “is an unnoticed death.”
“Unnoticed?” I say, and my corpse’s mouth makes the shape of the word too.
“The snow of death muffles the sound of it dragging you away. It will blanket your corpse and bury you alone. This,” she says, “is a death that in the end will only be known to me.”
Her fingers rest against the piano keys, and she plays the final note.
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