All Fall Down
Written by: Tom Reagan
Prompt #31
He tried to whisper her name, but the sound wouldn’t come.
He tilted back his head, mouth open as he tried vainly to shake any last remaining drops of water from the bottle onto his parched throat. Denied, he dropped the empty plastic to the ground and kicked it away, listening as it rolled weakly down the cracked and dessicated path before him. Lightning struck and the attendant thunder dutifully followed, but he doubted it would bring rain. It almost never did.
The heat was unbearable. The dust was worse. He began coughing and doubled over, clutching his chest, before he fell to the ground. He managed to pull in a wheezing breath before passing out and groaned as he tried to regain his composure. Carrion birds circled overhead. He saw this and laughed bitterly, bringing on more painful coughing. This place would do just as well as any other.
He propped himself up on his elbows and watched as the birds’ silhouettes glided across the sunburnt sky. He knew they were bound to outlast him on this earth, even if not for long. What difference did any of that make at this point? People die. He knew that. He knew these birds would die too, even after they had devoured his body, and someday soon after that so would everyone on the poisoned earth die.
He mourned his sons. They would tell no tales of their father, nor would anyone else (who else?) remember him. He was too tired and weak to weep over this, or over the fact that entire civilizations had fallen. Entire histories and languages had been wiped out and would be totally forgotten and he felt that one day, millions or billions of years in the future, as the waves of nameless oceans swept over nameless beaches, that this poisoned earth would crash into the surface of our dying sun, wiping away any evidence that we might have ever been here at all and what would any of this matter then?
He tried to whisper her name one more time.
