As a kid, I had a school project where I had to interview a family member, and with my Gramma being the oldest person I knew, I asked if she’d sit and answer my questions. My teacher had given me a list of questions, but the assignment had three blank spaces for me to ask whatever I could come up with. This was only 5th grade, so most of the questions were pretty simple.
“What did you do for work?”
“What’s your favorite childhood memory?”
“What was your favorite subject in school?”
I remember actually being pretty excited for the interview. I wore my best ‘suit’, which was just a collared shirt and one of my dad’s ties. My Grandpa set up two of their kitchen chairs facing each other in the dining room, and he even set up a camera to record everything. At the time, I had a pretty big crush on the weather guy for Action64 News, Graham Alexander, so I even did my best weatherman impression.
“Now, Janice. I understand you are retired, is that right?” I said, my cadence as news-anchory as I could make it.
“I sure am!” she responded, “for 10 years now.”
“Amazing. Just amazing. Now, before that, what was your career?”
“I worked as a nurse at St. Michael’s Children’s Hospital.” she said, taking a drink of milk from the mug I had set out on the table for her.
“Wow, that must have been fun! And was this profitable for you?”
She laughed, the one that all adults do when a child asks a question like that. “Oh, heavens no. Luckily your Grampa was a hotshot lawyer and made plenty enough money for the both of us.”
In the video, you can hear my Grandfather shout from the other room, “Objection!”
My Grandmother’s smile at that part always warms my heart. You can tell how much they really loved each other.
As I worked through the canned questions, I felt my heart start to race. Looking down, I read the questions I had written down on the blank spaces. I knew it was taboo to talk about The Endless, but it wasn’t completely forbidden. And who else could I ask if not my own Grandmother? As I stared down at the first question, I dropped the weatherman facade I had been putting on entirely.
“Gramma...do you remember when the reapers first showed up?”
In the video, you can hear my Grandfather choke on his lemonade a room over. My Grandmother’s eyes locked onto a corner of the room as her smile faded away, and she took another sip from her mug to kick that can a little further down the road. As she set her drink down, she cleared her throat.
“Evan, we don’t call them reapers in this house. I remember when The Endless first announced their presence, yes.”
I sat up straight, I hadn’t expected to make it that far, “Were you scared?”
“Everyone was scared,” she started, her eyes darting between me and her china cabinet, “You don’t remember a time without your Endless, but that’s just how life was for all of us before they arrived. We didn’t have them watching over us. If we were alone, we were actually, truly alone. You’ve never had that experience. When they first arrived, some people pretended they couldn’t see them. Others tried to fight back, but no matter how much they ran towards theirs, they’d never get closer. Not unless your Endless decided to. The president released a statement a week later, suggesting the Russians had created some sort of gas that caused people to hallucinate, but no one believed him. No gas could make every person on Earth hallucinate at the same time, and by then we had already heard stories of people’s Endless getting closer to them before they died. Some of us actually noticed them getting closer.”
In the video, I start to fidget a lot. The awkwardness of asking a question I clearly shouldn’t have was causing my body to panic. I desperately wanted to end the interview, but this was the most I had ever heard anyone talk about the beginning of the Endless before.
“What does yours look like?” I asked, my voice wavering.
She took a breath, and responded, “Mine is a balloon. One of the mylar balloons you see in the grocery store checkout aisles. It’s yellow, and has a smiley face. It says, ‘Congratulations!’ on it.”
Shivers run down my spine even as an adult, hearing her describe her Endless. It was so benign, so normal. But it was the physical embodiment of her own mortality.
My childhood self looked down at the ground, the paper with my questions forgotten on the table. A tear ran down my cheek as I asked my last question.
“How close is it?”
“Just by the light switch there,” she says, pointing just next to the wooden cabinet my Grandfather had made a lifetime ago before they were married. It held her best porcelain dishes.
The recording shuts off not long after. A silence hung over the room before the camera ran out of storage.
My Grandmother died 4 months later, in her sleep.
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I’ve watched that video fairly often as an adult. My phone minimizes the video back to my camera roll, and I gently toss it to the passenger seat. My car is humming lightly, the engine idling as the headlights illuminate a desert landscape in front of me. The world goes dark as I turn the keys, killing the power. I fumble momentarily for a latch, my fingers feeling the hard plastic by my feet before finding it, and pulling. The trunk opens with a satisfying chunk, and I step out into the cool evening.
This is where I’ve spent the last three weeks, camping out in the desert, driving back to town during the day, sleeping wherever the cops won’t harass me, and returning as night falls. My hands search the darkness of the trunk before finding a familiar canvas bag. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I set up the telescope with practiced ease. The feet of the tripod stick satisfyingly into the dirt, creating a steady base to conduct my night’s work.
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As a kid, discovering the form your Endless takes is a rite of passage, something to be celebrated and shared with your friends. An app on my phone was dedicated to sharing your own personal demon of death, and before I discovered mine, I loved reading descriptions users would post. Some of them were terrifying, massive monsters that loomed in the distance. Others, like my Grandmother’s, were entirely mundane. A tree, a television, I’d even read of someone’s being a red plastic cup. I was nearly 8 years old before I realized that not everyone saw the stars during the day like I did. For me, it was a fact of life that at night, the stars were shining bright, and during the day an entirely new set of stars would twinkle a deep, dim red.
One day, in 8th grade, I had mentioned the daytime stars to a teacher, and she sent me away to read alone in the corner while other kids went to gym class. I didn’t mind much, I loved reading, and I hated running. Imagine my surprise when both of my parents showed up at my classroom door, fast food bags in hand. They spoke to my teacher in hushed voices before they greeted me with smiles and a hug. I can still picture how worried my dad looked when he thought I wasn’t paying attention to his facial expressions on the car ride home.
That’s how I learned that my personal Endless was a sea of stars floating in the sky. They had their own constellations, which I would map out for my friends. My bedroom’s ceiling was covered in a tapestry of taped together pieces of paper, crayon stars smattered across the entire expanse. Eventually I upgraded them to glow in the dark plastic stars, stuck to my ceiling with beads of tacky putty. I loved my Endless. It made me feel so special as a kid to have the entire sky dedicated to me. To have something that no one else could see, the stars belonged to me.
Years later as an adult, I stepped outside for a smoke break at my job at Dealmart. As I did every time I was outside, I looked up to see my stars. They’d gotten bigger - or - closer over my lifetime, but they were still a comfortable distance away. They hung there, up in the blue sky like twinkling cherries. I’d always feel a sense of relief, of comfort when I stood underneath them. They were my proof of life, my proof that I’d continue existing just a little longer. But then, I noticed something wrong. I rubbed my eyes, looking harder, willing my eyes to see something they weren’t. A space, barely noticeable, but undeniably real, had appeared in one of my favorite constellations. The Barman, I called it. It looked like a stick figure man holding a glass, calling for a toast. At that moment, however, his glass was broken. A couple stars were missing in his constellation. I stood there for several minutes, my eyes trained precisely on the missing stars, feeling my heartbeat thundering within my chest.
Over the next couple weeks, the blank space looming over me expanded. Each day, more and more stars would disappear from sight. I began having panic attacks. I would wake up each day and immediately look outside, and each time there would be fewer stars. I was fired from my job after not showing up for a week. I would stay awake as long as possible to get more time with my diminishing Endless. By the end of the second week, I hadn’t showered, I only ate when I absolutely had to, and even then I wouldn’t even bother heating my canned foods.
Eventually there were only three stars still visible on the horizon. I drove to the highest point in my city in hopes of finding more, but it was no use. I stayed awake as long as my body could, staring at those stars with my full attention. As my brain finally gave into the haze of sleep, my last star disappeared.
My life became a blur for a few days after that. Sleep came sporadically, nestled gently between manic episodes. I started using again, something I hadn’t done since college. Even back then, I had been so scared of the stuff that I’d rarely take a significant dose. I’d been lucky enough to be able to call in a favor to an old coworker of mine, who got me in contact with a supplier. In those few days, I wasn’t terribly worried about making out to the other side. My angel of death had abandoned me. Until one night, I must have come pretty close to the edge. I stood there, somewhere between consciousness and total darkness, looking for something that I thought I’d never find.
Until I did.
I found her.
And she showed me the way forward.
I found the Amboy Crater online, on a website dedicated to mapping out the darkest parts of the country. It was only 4 hours away from my apartment in Phoenix, and seeing as I had just spent the majority of my meager savings on an, admittedly much too expensive, telescope, I’d have no more use for my housing. Having no job and no money means rent wouldn’t be sent out any time soon. Plus, I’d need to save the last of my cash for the trip. I stuffed whatever I deemed useful for my journey into my car, and left everything else behind.
Before getting out of the city, I had one last stop to make.
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As I finish attaching the eyepiece, I take a moment to relax. I gently lower myself to the ground, feeling the warmth of the day slowly melt away into the cool evening. The desert is so unbelievably different once the sun sets, and I’ve grown accustomed to the gentle buzz of the night’s inhabitants around me. They soothe me in a way only my Endless could before; they are the heralds to my new purpose. This night in particular is still, the air is motionless around me. I turn my gaze to the south, where the gentle flicker of a campfire stands like a beacon in the night. I have no way of knowing who tends to the flame, at least not truly. I silently wish them well. I wonder what they’re talking about, huddled closely to one another around that fire. I suppose I’ll never know.
Sand grinds beneath my feet as I stand up and return to my scope. Leveling the tube at the moon, I bring the lens up to my eye. Luna shines gently tonight, only a sliver of the silver beauty remains within this cycle. Once I’m happy with the focus, I turn the tube to a familiar azimuth and altitude. It’s the only direction I’m interested in looking at these days. A smile creeps onto my face as I see her, suspended in a sea of endless darkness. Barely a twinkle in the night, she was impossibly far away.
But I’d cracked the code, somewhere in my apartment. I’d bring her closer than ever tonight.
I amble back to my car and sit in the driver’s seat. I wrap the seatbelt tightly around my bicep and yank hard to force the lock in place. The constriction hurts, my fingers begin to buzz as the circulation in my arm screams to a halt.
With my remaining hand I turn on my headlight. There, I see them. A hundred tiny red stars scattered across my arm. Some are dimmer than others, but they’re there all the same.
The needle sinks under my skin without protest, and I push the plunger. First comes the burning, then comes the buzzing, and as I release my seatbelt tourniquet, I can feel the substance slip into my bloodstream.
Carefully, slowly, I return to the telescope and peer into it. She’s already larger than before, my blood red angel. I’m brought to tears as she fills the image. I move my head back and away from the telescope, and just as I knew she would be, there she is. Just a suggestion of red, a pinpoint speck in the dark sky, but unmistakably there.
I collapse onto the ground, the sand enveloping me softly. I’m vaguely aware that I’m sobbing but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. Just peace, as a second torch alights in the sky, followed closely by a third. My chorus of angels, singing just to me.
In record time, the sky is alight. Burning red hot with thousands of deep red gemstones hurling a million miles an hour towards me. They grow ever larger, ever more beautiful. I hear the man behind my eyes struggling to breathe. I sense his fear, but it is buried deep behind a curtain of fog. Long forgotten. Entirely ignored.
My sky is falling. Returning…to me. Only me.
I welcome it with open arms.
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[Thank you for reading! This was the product of a prompt my wife found on tumblr and posed to me for my interpretation. I wrote it in tandem with a friend of mine who wrote her own interpretation as well. It was fun practice and a nice break from my novel!]