I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.
Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.
Enjoy.
Burn Bright
For Kate Schubert. Thank you for your friendship and support.
No one understands anything these days. They don’t know why computer systems have begun to fail and their clouds drop data like rain. They don’t know why skyscrapers suddenly shiver on their massive skeletons and occasionally shed pieces of themselves onto the street. They don’t know why millions of bees have massed over Santa Cruz and Wichita and Richmond, their buzzing a giant bullroarer in the hand of heaven. They don’t know why the sun is swelling into ecstatic death five billion years early.
These days the scientists go sleepless and sweat over solutions and try and try and try. The governments go on full alert and send their troops into the streets to curb the panicked riots of the Save us, dammit, that’s why we pay our taxes! crowd, and the hell with posse comitatus. The celebrities and politicians go to underground shelters, looking reluctant and noble for the cameras. They don’t seem to understand that the deep places won’t save them; they will die in darkness as surely as we above will burn bright.
We hear it’s bad in the cities as people bunker up and hoard food, and the stink of uncollected suicides rises in the streets. We hear the sea is full of bodies, and the Grand Canyon… well, never mind. That doesn’t matter now. What’s important is that we do the right thing for our own.
I confer in my office in Town Hall with the city councillors, which is a grand way of saying that the four of us who have been running things for a while have our shoes off, our feet up, and a bottle of wine open so we can argue in comfort about what to do next.
I let everyone else talk first. I am the mayor, and I often get what I want; that makes it more important to know what other folks want too. Even now. Maybe especially now. So I listen while Tyrone makes a case for death being a private event best left to each family; Jess ponders the need for a community ritual; and Stu, whom I’ve always suspected of a fascist streak, opines that the criminal, the sick, the elderly and the reluctant ought to be given a little social assistance with their dying so as not to be the inheritors of the earth in case the sun wanders off to another part of the galaxy to do its burning. Stu is not so smart, but he does like to think things through.
Everyone says their piece. There’s a silence. Outside, the sun is brighter than we’ve ever seen it. Tyrone pours us all more wine.
“What do you think, Bea?” Jess says.
I think that I’m sixty-four and a grandmother and a farmer and I am going to have to kill my animals myself so they don’t suffer; and though they will not understand why they’re dying, they will know that I am doing it. I think that I am in a mighty rage, and it makes me feel alone and small under the weight of the question: how shall we die? I was planning to go home and end as I’ve lived, on my own terms. But now I have listened to what they’ve said, even Stu, and I realize that we may be only a small town, and we may only be small people, but we need each other like we always have. Even now. Maybe especially now.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” I say. “I think we should have a picnic in the park. Everyone comes. Everyone who wants to,” I add for Stu’s benefit. “We have a nice day and a nice evening, and then before dawn we have some Kool Aid or some special wine.”
“What about the ones who won’t?” Stu says, with his chin out.
“This is America,” I say. “Everyone’s got the right to die alone.”
#
After we’ve settled Stu down and are into the details of the plan, I say to Jess, “Will you play us out?”
Her eyes fill with tears. Finally she says, “Yes, I… Yes.”
#
On the last afternoon, we all sit down under trees and tents to fried chicken and steak and pork chops, potato salad, pots of boiled corn, enormous bowls of strawberries, blackberry pies. We have a lot of fun. The grownups tell all the old stories about each other and laugh so hard we snort our wine. The smaller kids splash in the fountains and run shrieking with laughter back to their parents for more sunblock. It’s the teens I feel the worst for: too old to play, too young to laugh with human joy in the face of human death. But we all do our best. And the last dusk falls and our part of the globe turns from the sun and begins its journey back. Somewhere in the world, people are beginning to burn.
About an hour before dawn, the sky is already light enough to see each other clearly. I catch Jess’s eye, and nod, and begin to pass out drinks.
Jess carries her cello to the chair we’ve placed in the clearing. The rest of us sit. Everyone looks at me.
“To us,” I say. “To life.” And we drink.
In the distance, the sun is firing the tops of the trees. Jess pulls her cello closer and begins to play.