Earl and Paula at the End of the World
by Ryan Goodwin
They say pure white is the combination of all the colors of the color spectrum and
that blackness is the absence of color, but they also say the entire universe sprang
out of nothingness and that thought was too philosophical, or maybe just too plain
stupid for Paula to wrap her mind around, so when the blackness first appeared in
the distance she had no conceptual idea of what it really was. She only knew that
it was indeed black, a deeper black than she’d ever seen, a blackness that spread
fear through her body, aching like arthritis between every tired joint and withered
ligament, planting itself somewhere deep in the collected knowledge of all human experience
imprinted on her mind at birth. Earl thought it was the end days, Armageddon. The
universe was regressing upon itself. Everything would go, including them. At first
it was just the tree line that disappeared, out across the pasture beneath the hill
where Earl’s great uncle’s cabin sat, the cabin where they’d planned to spend what
was left of their lives, not that they’d hoped it would end soon, but they didn’t
know where else to go or what else to do; there were no children, no grandchildren,
no friends or siblings, at least none that remembered who they were or could collect
what was left of their minds long enough to satisfy Paula’s desperate need for almost
constant conversation. They’d been there less than a week when it happened, and once
it had, once the idea of it really settled in her mind, Paula thought she’d heard
the blackness, nothingness, whatever it was, coming in the silence of the cabin, but
she’d been told once that sound can’t travel through a vacuum, and she thought she
just might have imagined hearing it, just might have wanted to have heard it coming,
to know, somehow, somewhere inside her, even if she couldn’t pinpoint where, that
it was all coming to an end, not just life, but everything, all of it, the whole of
existence, and it all happened so fast. One morning Earl went outside to feed the
stray cats that hung around the front porch, mostly because he wouldn’t stop feeding
them, and he was standing on the top step, sipping whiskey from his favorite glass
— Earl was an alcoholic, always had been — and licking the watery tuna residue from
his fingers when Paula heard him gasp and the glass shatter at his feet, and when
she went out to check on him, he was just standing there, gaze locked on the blackness,
his eyes disbelieving. She tried to comfort him at first, but it was impossible to
look away, because the world was finite now, there was only so much of it, a square
mile or two and then nothing, and that changed things, really changed things. After
a couple days, when the ancient landline couldn’t find a dial tone and the static
of the radio was just too damned eerie to listen to, they resigned to sitting on the
porch in their matching rocking chairs to watch the world end, Earl sipping whiskey
and questioning god and the validity of afterlife, Paula chain smoking cigarettes
and verbally contemplating darkness and the perception of time, and, if Paula were
to be frank, the whole thing was a little boring after a while. Every day the blackness
crept a little closer and soon their conversations devolved into a litany of repetitive
bickering; Paula would say there’s no such thing as nothingness and Earl would take
a long sip, as if she was what drove him to drink and not his inability to process
emotions any better than when he was a child or the growing absence of compassion
for anything outside of his own warped perception of how the world had mistreated
him. He’d tell her that there was nothingness, that they were all that was left and
nothing at all existed outside of them; they were life and the darkness was death,
and he was sorry, but that’s just how it was now, and she’d say she didn’t feel like
waiting any longer, why not just meet the darkness half way, but Earl wasn’t ready
for that. He ran out of whiskey about the time the blackness crept up to the foot
of the hill and took to smoking stale cigars and calling out for the stray cats every
few minutes or so, but they never showed up and Paula didn’t have the heart to make
him understand that they were gone, that everything was gone and that they too would
be gone soon. She just sat next to him and tried not to say anything to make him cry
again, but soon, the darkness was just too overwhelming, too vast, and it called to
her. One day, Earl fell asleep in his chair, and Paula thought it was as good a time
as any, so she kissed him once on the forehead and descended the short steps, feeling
what was left of the grass between her toes. She paused, just inches from the dark,
when she thought she felt a breeze, but she couldn’t really know because it had been
so long since she’d really felt anything, and the sensation was gone before she could
decide if it had ever really been there. She looked back at Earl, asleep in the rocking
chair she’d bought at an estate sale, and briefly considered mounting the steps and
sitting next to him, but she’d spent her whole life with Earl and there are just some
things you have to do alone.