Before the lion takes its share, leaves us in pieces, scattered everywhere

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:29:25 GMT

I really haven't posted since I got back from China, a combination of laziness, tons of work and some more laziness.
I've started taking kung fu lessons, which are hilariously fun and pretty kick ass. I don't kick much ass, but there are quite a few people who do.
I'm also totally out of practice at eljaying. So instead, here's a story!

Seven Days to Say it Right

7.
Saturday morning, on the local news,
A chirpy young woman
Reports the end of the world.
They’re a bit fuzzy on the time,
But the date is for sure-
Just seven days now,
Until the end of the world.

“Okay,” says Holly, sitting at her kitchen table, taking in the news. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but her mother looks up from her frantic packing. A duffel is open on the counter and Mrs. Mason is dumping the contents of the pantry into it.
“Holly, why aren’t you packing?” Her mother asks, her voice rising in pitch.
“Mom, I’m not going.” Holly says, resting her chin in her hands as the tv chatters on.
“What do you mean?” Holly’s mother isn’t angry, just surprised. She’s a romantic, she chose to marry a penniless author, planned to become an interior decorator, and was always going to die in her parents’ shack out in Sag Harbor. David gave up writing and got a job as a software consultant, and she dropped out of design school when she got pregnant, but Catherine Mason is going to die by the ocean.
“The world’s going to end just the same whether we’re in the city or by the sea.” Holly glares at her mother, who starts to wilt a little. Holly’s brash mulishness isn’t from her flighty mother or her quiet and thoughtful father.
“Catherine, if we’re going to get out there, we’ve got to go now,” says David in his deep, slow voice as he enters the kitchen. On the television, people are spilling through the streets. David goes to stand behind his daughter and rests a gentle hand on her shoulder. He never likes to fight a losing battle.
“David, we can’t just leave her here.” Catherine says desperately.
“I’m going to be fine, just go. It doesn’t matter, Mom.” Holly interjects.
Catherine glances between her daughter and her husband and she zips up the duffel with resignation.
The apocalypse really must be coming, Holly thinks, for her to have won this fight. Her parents’ footsteps echo down the apartment stairwell. Through the open window, Holly hears the car start up three floors down, the tires squeal down the street.
Eventually Holly makes her way down the stairs, sprawls on the stoop and watches the city begin to boil over.

6.
Six days,
And they changed the Times Square clock
Now it’s a countdown and no one forgets.

“Hi,” says Leon, experimentally. In the dim light of the library, this seems like a good idea. Holly Mason looks up from a book on Norse mythology, dark hair and solemn brown eyes against a gray turtleneck sweater.
“You’re, uh, you’re in my homeroom class, right?” Holly asks, leaning back in her chair.
“Yeah. I’m Leon.” This is actually the second year in a row that they’ve been in the same homeroom. Holly sits by the window and never looks away. The view is what Leon would consider boring, the empty playground, the silent apartment buildings across the street, the city skyline, same as it’s always been. He supposes Holly sees something different.
“You don’t look like a Leon.” Holly observes, and Leon can’t help but flush, because he knows this. He’s short and gawky and his hair sticks up at funny angles no matter how much he brushes it down. ‘That isn’t much of a mane’ jokes got old sometime around fourth grade.
Holly sets her book down, still open to the page she had been reading. Leon sits across the table from her, fingers aimlessly tracing the scratches in the wood.
“Ragnarok?” he asks, looking at her book. “You know that school is over, for ever, right? You don’t need to write that English essay.” Holly must know, she was there in class on Friday when they made the announcement. She shrugs.
“I know. I just like the Norse. They had the best gods. Or the most human, anyway. They lie and break promises and can’t outrun their fates.”
“Do you think this is our fate?” Leon asks. He doesn’t know Norse mythology, only that their gods went down in fire. Holly taps the book as she thinks about Leon’s question.
“I don’t know about fate. But don’t you think the world’s been headed downhill for awhile now? Not only that, but we’re the ones who sent it going down in the first place. Maybe we deserve it.”
Leon can’t help but shake his head.
“Who deserves death?” he asks and looks up from the varnished wood to meet Holly’s eyes. She stares back for a moment but quickly turns her head away slightly.
“Does it even matter now?” She says quietly, without the fire of her previous remarks. “We’re going to die either way.”
Leon has been thinking about this quite a bit. What he’s realized is this,
“We were all going to die before, one way or another. Nothing’s really changed except how we’re going to go.” It echoes in the empty library, settling against book spines and in the dusty corners. It follows them outside into the too bright sunlight, repeated in the wail of a siren several blocks away.

5.
The morning traffic left the city
Instead of coming in.
A stream of people went walking through the Holland tunnel
Headed for the hills

Leon shows up on Monday morning, voice slow and quiet over the crackling speakerphone.
“Mind if I up come up? I looked up your address in the school phonebook.” He sounds embarrassed, but Holly only laughs and hits the button to unlock the front door. She leaves the door from the stairs open for him and goes into the kitchen to find something for breakfast.
Holly hears Leon on the stairs and calls out,
“I’m in the kitchen.” When he enters, Holly brandishes a cup o’ noodles at him. “Want some?”
“No, no, thanks.”
“You live down in the forties, right?” Holly asks and waves him to a seat at the counter.
“Yeah, between 2nd and 3rd, on 46th.” Leon says as he eases onto a stool, feet kicking against a leg. He watches as Holly moves through the kitchen, checking the cabinets for anything her mother left behind.
“Oh, that’s not so bad.” She says as the electric kettle starts to whistle. Holly lives between 1st and the river, as close to a cul de sac as Manhattan will ever have. It’s a four-story building, old ironwork and red brick softened by creeping ivy. The racing, fast paced city of the movies is far removed from the eastern end of 58th.
“Yeah, it’s pretty quiet around here. Down by the UN things have been getting sort of messy, but it’s quieted down a lot since Saturday. Enough for my mom to go to work this morning, at any rate.” Leon’s voice is casual, but Holly jumps on the trace of worry in his face.
“She went to work today? What’s the point?” She takes the kettle and pours some of the boiling water into her cup o’ noodles and prods at the noodles with the plastic fork provided in the cup.
“She runs a travel agency, does tours of New York. I think she’s pretending nothing has happened, or she hasn’t let herself admit it. She can get… weird, sometimes. Not all there, I guess.” He shrugs, as if to laugh it off. “Where are your parents, Holly?”
“They’re going to die out on Long Island.” Holly says it matter of factly, because that is what it is. Leon’s reaction is visceral surprise.
“Why didn’t you go with them? They’re your parents. Your family.” He says the last word as if to imbue it with some special, sacred meaning.
“I hate the ocean. I don’t want to die there. I’d rather be here, I’d rather watch this city instead of the yuppies in their beach houses.”
“That’s all you care about? Who will provide the most entertaining view of the apocalypse?”
Holly slurps her noodles and thinks about it.
“It’s not like being with my parents would change our fates. So what else is there to do but watch what happens? Being here is more interesting than Sag Harbor. And if I’d gone, we never would have talked.”
“I guess,” says Leon, unconvinced.
“Are you sure you don’t want some noodles?” Holly asks.

4.
They let the animals from the Central Park Zoo
Go running through the park.
Everyone agreed,
No one deserves to die in a cage
Funny though,
The criminals stayed in theirs.

“I found a pair of tickets for the Top of the Rock.” Holly says, over what appears to be her morning ritual of dehydrated noodles. “Want to go?”
“Do you think the Plaza is even open at this point?” Leon wonders.
Holly shrugs nonchalantly. “Only one way to find out. Besides, we didn’t do anything yesterday. We should go sightseeing while we still have the time.”
Leon can’t refute her logic, and finds himself walking the mile or so to Rockefeller Plaza, Holly at his side.
She isn’t anything like he imagined when he wondered about her in school. The constant contemplation, that part fits, maybe even the extreme detachment. Living entirely off ramen, a house full of Stevie Wonder albums, the quiet sadness on her face as she watches the news, Leon never suspected those.
The Top of the Rock is open in that no one is there to tell them it’s not. The ground floor elevator is locked, so they take the stairs, racing up the spiral staircase to the tenth floor, then an eternity through the emergency stairwell.
Sixty flights later, they pant as they lean against the plexiglass railing, the sun is bright above them. The city is spread out below them, the grit and grime airbrushed away by height and light.
“What a world,” Leon says, breathing deeply. Above the streets, the air feels purer, sharp cold wind against his face.
“What do you mean?” Holly asks.
The wind is blowing her hair into her eyes as she leans forward over the plexiglass, staring down to the ground.
“Just that it’s beautiful.”
“You think this city is beautiful?” She flings a hand out, a flick of the wrist is all that it takes to convey her disdain for what’s below them.
To the north is Central Park, splitting the island in half, lush and verdant as though it hasn’t gotten the message that the world is scheduled to die soon. All around them are the skyscrapers of Manhattan, concrete and steel and fiberglass.
“Yeah, I do.”
“But the people,” Holly says, “the people are ugly.”
Leon looks at her askance and says, with something a little like religious faith, “the people are the best part of this city.” He thought this would be obvious, but maybe now he’s the one seeing something different through the window.
“People lie and steal and start wars and break promises, they can’t be good.”
“Then we’re just like your Norse gods, aren’t we? They led a thousand wars and broke enough promises to turn their world to ashes.”
“So this is our Ragnarok then?” Holly suggests, a smile forming on her lips.
“Sure, and when everything is done, we’ll play chess with golden pieces in Central Park.” It’s what the last of the gods did, a final game on the battlefield when everything was over.
Holly laughs, the sound ringing out above the dying city.

3.
They were going to send a man to space,
To see if he could outrun the end.
But they only had room for one on board,
And who wants to be the last man standing
When no one else is getting up?

Wednesday they go wandering, to see the world from the ground now that they’ve seen it from the air.
They end up at the edge of Times Square, only to see police barriers and crowds of people clogging the streets. This isn’t all that different from usual.
Edging closer, Holly in the lead, they see hundreds of people sitting motionless in the square from sidewalk to sidewalk, their faces are lifted to the clock. It’s counting down until Saturday- days, hours, minutes, seconds, the numbers falling away like sand in the wind.
Leon and Holly leave quickly, subdued and silent.
It’s not until they’re back in familiar territory that Leon speaks. “How can they just sit there like that, while time slips away?” He’s fidgety, tapping fingers against his leg as he walks.
“Each to their own, I guess. I know plenty of people who headed for the hills weeks ago, rather than stick it out. Maybe it’s easier to watch that clock run down than live out the rest of their days.”
Leon can’t help but shiver. “It was mesmerizing, in a way. So little time left. I’m not sure I wanted the reminder.”
“I don’t know, there’s something to be said for it. I don’t want to ever forget what’s going to happen, otherwise I might not spend this time right.” Holly says slowly.
“Do you think you’re spending it right? Is there even a way to spend your last week properly?”
“I don’t think this is so bad. Making a friend, even if it’s just for a week, that seems pretty right to me.”
“I wonder,” Leon muses, “if we could still be friends, if the world doesn’t end.”
“But it’s going to, so who cares?” Holly says, unlocking her front door.
Leon sighs, he long ago realized Holly wasn’t prone to flights of fancy. “But still…”
“Just don’t think like that.” Holly advises staunchly. “It’ll make you more depressed when the world really does end.”
Leon gives up and follows her inside.

2.
The unraveling begins,
The city still won’t sleep
But now it holds it breath.

Leon rings the doorbell later than is usually his custom; Holly finishes her noodles long before he comes up the stairs.
“My mom. She didn’t come home from work last night.” He says shortly, dropping to the couch in Holly’s living room.
“Leon, did you sleep at all last night?”
“I don’t, maybe, I think. It doesn’t matter.” He snaps, and Holly straightens up to snap back, but stops short. Leon’s fists are clenched so tight they’re shaking slightly in his lap.
“It’s okay, I’m sure she’ll be back.” Holly tries, and she’s knows it’s fallen flat. Neither of them believe that. It’s Thursday, after all.
“I wanted to be there, at the end, with her. She’s my mom, that’s how it should be.” Leon falls silent, head in his hands.
“But, will it really matter, in the end? We’re all going to die alone in the end, whether the two of you are together or not.” She had meant it as a comfort, she really had.
But Leon stood, back ramrod straight and eyes blazing. His words are slow, but the easy gentleness Holly is accustomed to is gone, and every word drips fire.
“That’s not the point Holly.” And he turns on his heel and leaves the apartment without another word.

1.
In all the movie theaters
They gave a final showing-
Sunrises across the world
In case tomorrow’s doesn’t come.

Holly quickly realizes that Leon isn’t going to appear on her doorstep. It’s lonely, she realizes, though taken her a day to put a name to the feeling that dogged her all through Thursday and into Friday morning. Holly is an only child, she’s no stranger to loneliness. But it’s never bit like this, tugging at the corner of her mind until she’s out the door and headed south.
His building has a doorman, uniformed and cheerful. The apocalypse, Jose reasons, is probably just media hype. He’ll never leave New York, no matter what. He won’t let her take the elevator up until she ‘pounds it’.
On the seventh floor Leon answers the door, and his face is as tired as Holly has ever seen it.
“I’m sorry.” She says immediately, and is rewarded by the visible relaxing of Leon’s shoulders. He swings the door open and gestures for her to come inside.
His apartment is much smaller than Holly’s, there’s a kitchen tucked in a nook, a bathroom through one door and a bedroom through the second. Leon sleeps on the fold-out couch, the blankets are still in a pile on one cushion.
“It’s not much, but, have a seat.” He tosses the blankets off the couch and pulls up a chair from the kitchen table.
“No, it’s nice. I like it.” Holly says, and means it. The furniture is sparse, but all of it is nice, if worn. Old paintings hang framed on the walls, Chinese mountain-scapes for the most part.
“I didn’t think you’d actually come all the way here.” Leon admits. “You’re not really one for apologizing.”
“No, I’m not.” Holly agrees, and takes a moment to gather her courage before saying, “The city is lonelier without you.”

0.
Ragna means the gods
And the second part is rök,
Which means end
And fate
And sometimes, I’ve heard it said
It means Beginning.

The sun rises on the Hudson, fire on the water. There has never been a morning like this, the fury and the passion of the world, painted on the canvas of the sky.
And then it’s all forgotten because Robert Frost got it oh-so wrong, this world will end in light.

Insanity's horse adorns the sky

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:00:49 GMT

This journal is friends only.
Comment to be added if I know you.

I am the last of a lost civilization

Before the lion takes its share, leaves us in pieces, scattered everywhere

Insanity's horse adorns the sky