#im sorry if my science talk is grossly inaccurate

[uraniumglassbong]

small

a/n: went to a writing workshop and got the advice to start with the ending of a story instead of the beginning- it’s a little rough since I’m used to coming up with a great beginning that I abandon halfway through. But I got some sick characters out of it that I will definitely be writing more of, so score I guess

At some point Louie stopped winding the clock every morning. It used to be the way he started every day: he would cross the room from his bed to his desk, bare feet padding the warm stone floor, and he’d pick up the silver alarm clock, set it for another twenty-four hours (he knew that there were digital clocks everywhere, there was one on the computer right next to the clock, but his fatal flaw was sentimentality). He’d watch the weather while he wound. The rain would pound the window before him. The sun would drop Agent Orange on the skyline. It was always, always beautiful.

That wasn’t the part he enjoyed, though. What he enjoyed was turning his back on the view, on the empty distant cities and the dwindling scrawny trees that made it so easy to track how long ago the world’s heart stopped beating. What he enjoyed was turning his back on the window to look at Ithaca. At Ithaca, tangled up in his side of the sheets with one foot hanging off the bed, who was about to sit up so slowly and gingerly you’d think that every one of his ribs was broken, whose wiry hair hadn’t been tamed since the two of them had locked themselves at the top of the tallest building in the world. The tower that had been made especially for them to watch the world. To watch it die.

It wasn’t entirely their idea. In fact, the more the two of them talked about it, punching the timers on their chessboard or sweeping the floor from opposite ends, the less a say it seemed they had in the matter. It was the United Nations. It was NASA. It was MIT. It wasn’t them.

The less they talked about it-- any of it-- the happier they were.

They talked about barometric pressure changes and airborne illnesses. One of them would scribble on the blackboard until it was chalk-full, and the other would erase it to prove a point. They cleaned off solar cells and edited each others’ work into the night, they played shuffleboard with their Nobel Prize medals and they watered the vegetables in their indoor garden. And over meals, they talked about their wedding.

“What kind of flowers?”

“Lillies.”

“Aren’t those death flowers?”

“I like lillies.”

“Fine. Lilies and... fern.”

“Who’s going to officiate?”

Ithaca has stared out the spotless window for a long time. Louie has refused to follow his gaze. Finally: “An Elvis impersonator.”

They rearranged their furniture almost every month. It was a small space: just the bedroom, the lab, and the greenhouse that was half filled with food and half filled with samples. If they hadn’t changed things, they would have got crazy. There were a few things they didn’t touch, though: the radio, never used, and the single piece of paper next to it that was tacked up on the wall from floor to ceiling. The paper was titled TIMELINE. It listed every step in the process of human extinction, from the outbreak of a mutated flu pandemic to the six months it would take to do its damage to the twelve years it would take for the planet to hold life again. Everything was taken into account, from the presence of mosquitos to predicted snowfall.

Their predictions were dead accurate. Ten years and everything had gone according to plan.

Everything except the bullet point under the four-month mark:

• solution developed, communicated to UN

They gave up on month seven, when the light in a high-rise below them, that they had been watching like it was an endangered species, went out and never came back on. They kept winding the clock, though. Every morning. Until one-hundred and thirty-five months in, when Louie put Ithaca in one of the two customized coffins that lay in the storage space beneath the lab.

They’d had time to talk about it. The less Ithaca ate, the less they spoke of wedding cake (chocolate, with cream cheese frosting dyed dark green). One night, when he couldn’t get out of bed and lay staring at the ceiling, he joked that at least he was getting some practice in before the real thing. Louie had gone to spend the night in the greenhouse in response. He was back long before morning, though. There wasn’t any time to waste.

And now their wasn’t any time. The alarm didn’t go off. Louie tore down the TIMELINE and replaced it with an intricate diagram of the radioactive decay process. Everything gives off carbon. Everything that used to live. You bury things in dirt, but the dirt’s alive, too. The world was more decay and dead things than it was life, even before all the people in it caught a fever. That was why, even though his freezer contained all the materials to make the next Adam and Eve, he wasn’t going to. The responsibility to recreate humanity lay entirely on him now, and he had never been able to do important things alone.

Instead, he was going to reread the work he’s done during his time at MIT, when he was a professor and when he wasn’t the last man on earth. He reread his papers until they were memorized, until the floor of all three rooms was covered in paper. They were all on the same subject: extra-terrestrial bacteria. Aliens that everyone missed because no one could see. All his old friends had religions- either gods or eighties movies. Ithaca had clouds. Louie had the most underwhelming version of life beyond earth that anyone had ever come up with. He looked at flying saucers I’m TV and turned back to examining space suits under a microscope.

In general, the world was too big for Louie. Not the concept- the physical size. He had gotten lost in every mall he’d ever been in. He had been staunchly opposed to his residency in the tallest building in the world.

Ithaca had been small. His teeth had barely fit in his mouth. Every pen looked comically large in his hand.

Now, as he laid on the floor in the dark, in a room with a window that showed too much of the world- too many malls and high-rises and trees- on a bed of twelve-point font, Louie had one thing left. Somewhere in the world, and if not that, than the universe at large, was life.