So many billions of miles traveled; so many millions of years; so many planets and places and all the myriad races that spoke, bellowed, trumpeted, whispered, slid, slithered, walked, drifted, swam, worlds without end…  This tale is for my friend, Kim.. she knows why.

Message in a Bottle
 I

The last sunset of a dying world. That’s what everyone was calling it. But Khalida didn’t want to think of it like that. She realized that all her life, she had been told that their world was in its last stages, that all the things scientists had tried to do, that all the prayers in the world, that all the struggles had been for nothing- the world was dying, and with it, all living things. Including us, she thought to herself. Including me.

Somehow, that idea made her saddest. She had been told she was just being selfish, but she didn’t care. It’s our last sunset. My last sunset. After this, after tonight, there will be no more sunsets… we will die quickly in perpetual dark and freezing cold.

The last sunset, wan, a faint sliver of pale gold, a mere whisper of the glorious sunsets she had seen on films and in photographs, lent its last light to the dark sky, fading in its terminal farewell to all the planet.

Khalida looked up and out into the sky, now seeming so vast, a mass of shimmering stars. She recalled hearing of a time when people had tried to preserve dark skies in order to witness these same stars; a time when there were so many cities filled with so millions of people that the entire night sky was obliterated  by their lights. Now, nothing damped their light and from horizon to horizon, stars flickered, shimmered, shone pale or bright depending on their distance and the galactic winds and currents they shone through.

She sighed, placed the ancient papers in the tiny alcove one last time, touching them gently with her trembling hands, then drank the murky water and swallowed the pills she had been given. Time to sleep, now, she thought to herself. Sleep forever. We’ll be gone, living on as a  dead planet circling a dying sun, but we’re still part of the  stars, I suppose…. Maybe it’s okay… still part of eternity…maybe this … Khalida slept, and overhead, the stars watched as the black cold buried the long dead and the final dying.

II

Mantema pushed away from the telescope that dominated the dome. It’s over. Its final day..its long night begins. Part of her felt sad, but she was grateful at the same time. She felt the need to hurry, to be there for tonight’s ceremony…..

To read the rest of the story, see the link to The Twilight Mirror and The New Dawn by Jordan Amar.

© 2018 Eschate

“Whoever and whatever you are, we, too, once lived in this house of stars, and we thought of you” Timothy Ferris