Epilogue by Jeremy Bader

The guy standing in the middle of the road is a writer, and he’s getting away with it too.

He can get away with it because he has been published but not self-published, and also because there’s no longer anybody around to give much of a shit anyway.

He’s also, to a comparable degree, getting away with standing in the middle of the road.

He can get away with this – assuming, of course, that by “getting away” we are referring to the fact that he is able not only to stand in the middle of the road without being struck by an automobile, but also to continue to stand in the middle of the road without being struck by an automobile – because it is midnight (less traffic), and because the road is located in a suburb on the outskirts of the main city (even less traffic), but also because of the apocalypse that sauntered its way through the suburb four days ago like a shitty ice cream truck (significant quantities of less traffic… no traffic at all, actually).

If you were to ask him to, he wouldn’t be in much of a position to recall the nature of the apocalypse, nor the form it took… first and foremost because he doesn’t care to, but also because, even if he did care to, he can’t remember many details after such an extended period of time.

In any case, he’s standing in the middle of the road in the first place not in accordance with some contrived sense of victory over the vanquishment (vanishment) of through-passing traffic, as one might expect, but rather because the Northern Lights are just barely visible in the sky, he hasn’t ever seen them before, and he wants to see them at least once before he dies, although he’d be the first to admit they’re not all that much in their current state… or, rather, the current state of the planet.

In other news, he recently came to the conclusion that he’s all washed up. As a writer, I mean. As a person he’s doing gangbusters – after all, he survived the apocalypse, and continues to survive its aftermath long enough to not tell the tale, as previously addressed. The main reason he drew this conclusion that, as a writer, he’s all washed up, is that all his recent work is too derivative of all the other, better, post-apocalyptic works from which he draws influence. 

But now, as he stands staring at the sky and its poor excuse for a phenomenon, he nevertheless finds his mind aglow with countless numbers of wonderful little thoughts all bouncing off the walls of his skull, the passionate mediocrity of the Lights beaming so many beautiful ideas into his head that he worries some might fall out.

And he sheds a perfect little Hollywood tear as the lights die and the sky goes dark. Not out of any sense of hope or elation, but because he could think of no other way to describe their grandeur than spiritually, and he only considers himself good at writing dirty realism.

Ain’t that a kick in the ribs?

He remains staring at the sky, and the sky remains dark. He’d like to think it’s staring back at him. It’s not. Not really, anyway.

He sighs, the cruel punchline of his epilogue still ringing between his ears. He rubs the infected taste bud on the tip of his tongue against the back of his bottom row of teeth, then walks home.

He falls into bed, asleep before he hits the sheets.

Somewhere between a few blocks and a million miles away, something terrible is happening. He wouldn’t hear it even if he was awake.

Jeremy Bader

Image by Sharon Ang from Pixabay – a view of the aurora borealis but slightly disappointing with only one main colour – green (not that it would ever be disappointing really would it ?)