If death is inevitable, then the great end really isn’t as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be. That being said, some of the changes are irksome. For example, it’s difficult to find fruit that isn’t rotted through at the core. It’s broken-heart-disease, Mama used to say. As if fruit have a heart.

“Do you have a heart, Gemma?”

“Of course I do, Mama, you know it. What’s that gotta do with the rotten fruit?”

“Everything in life has a heart, baby. Don’t go ‘round thinking humans have the monopoly on living.”

I watch Mama slice into a peach with a dull kitchen knife, meticulously moving around the rotting pit while harvesting small bits of flesh suitable for eating. Juice drips down through her fingers and lazily puddles onto the broken, peeling steps of our front porch. I note that there is something striking in the quiet grace of her amongst all that decay, something ethereal, something I know will continue on long after everything has gone.

“Don’t call me baby. I’m fifteen Mama. Christ, I hate when you do that.”

I stand up and away from her indignantly, afraid to take in too much of her affections. For all I know her kindness might be contagious. She says nothing more as I step ‘round her and rocket myself down our dirt driveway in a storm of inconsolable rage. We have an unspoken agreement that so long as I am home for supper, on time, and in a respectable mood, that she will not ask after my whereabouts. Whether she knows what I do with my time concerns me not.

I turn my head back as I near the edge of our property line to look at her. She is sitting low down on the step, watching me with complete love, total faith. Why must she be so good?

It wasn’t long after the fruit started rotting that the animals got sick. Not a few select weak species - not a dog here in this town, and a cat in that there other town - all the land animals. People spend a lot of time trying to understand why, but no one can figure it out for certain. As if it matters. Stupid people.

Mama says the world started changing beyond doubt when she was in grade school. She said she felt the wind change direction, that it came straight up from the ground and worked its way furiously up and up, fighting to breathe and escape. On Sundays when I was younger she would drive us in the truck out of town to a high mountain valley to stretch our arms out wide underneath oceans of open sky so bright and blue it hurt my eyes. Mama would spin us until we felt nauseous. I knew Mama could read the wind. She had a way of making me think she was capable of mighty magic in the way she would talk to me with her voice of milk and honey, “It’s not a small change that’s coming my girl, it’s a big change. The kind the Universe orchestrates for thousands of years.”

Bewitched by my mother’s endearing eccentricities, I’d show up Monday morning’s at school with a head full of fairie dust and ask my friends if they wanted to spin in the wind, “Gemma don’t be retarded.”

~~~

I cannot remember for the life of me how I met Frankel. What I do recall is that my mother told me he emitted an energy of vengeance, which admittedly inspired me to seek him out. “Watch the company you keep, Gemma.”

“You don’t keep no company, Mama.”

“I am my own company. The best kind.”

Mama and I had gone into town to trade for turnips one evening following a day wrought with low rolling thunderstorms that spit fat flakes of translucent blue snow. Frankel had been detained in an abandoned parking lot with his face down on the hood of an undercover LEO sedan, hands cuffed behind his back. People were passing by, sticking their noses up in the air, pretending he wasn’t the kid they had abandoned after his mother died and his father fell so far into depression that he’d forget to trade for food, or care for Frankel.

“Well what do you expect? The boy is not right in the head, hasn’t had care or attention. Can’t blame him of course, but who can possibly afford to take care of him now?” They’d say.

Frankel and I locked eyes as I walked by that day; his were wide and stretched open in a way that looked like he never slept, like he didn’t know the peace of rest. As I said, I don’t recall when after that day we first spoke, but the result of it all was a swift and certain connection, like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence about destiny composed with absolute confidence.

Frankel is the most beautiful human being I ever want to know. Sometimes having only one truly beautiful person to care about is all you need to survive in this life. I don’t understand what I feel for Frankel when I use my mind to contemplate him. Moreso, I can feel my ache for him tingling up through my flesh. It is a simple desire - touch me, I will touch you back. Simple, uncomplicated. Except that it is because he isn’t interested. “Pleasure isn’t important right now, Gemma.”

Seems to me pleasure should always be important.

We started to meet every other day last year at high noon on the southernmost point of the bay to look for sea animals off the coast. Unlike land animals, ocean life is prospering, mainly because they are feasting on the bodies of people that walk into the sea. Lonely souls, unequipped in one fashion or another to deal with the great end. At first it was one or two people, somewhere distant, that sent a statement on the radio wires blabbing they wanted to have control over their personal exits - wouldn’t you know it caught on like wildfire, and people started walking into the sea with their families. There have been times when the wind is soft and sleepy, and the night is heavy with silence, when I can hear the sound of small children screaming, and elders weeping.

In the wicked hot days of the Indian summer, Frankel and I stumbled across a small hidden cove looking for shade. We found several dead bodies of children on the beach of that cove. Wave-walking children. All ages of them. Bizarre as it may be, the bodies were posthumously untouched. No mangled limbs, no evidence of sharks and parasites, they were just… dead. We returned several days later to find more bodies, new bodies, the previous ones having been swallowed by something mysterious and unknown. “Do you think we should tell somebody?”

“No Gemma. There are few small mysteries left.”

“You sound dead already.”

I ventured to the cove on my own, at random times, looking for patterns to the apparitions of the untouched dead bodies. I like patterns. When I was real young Mama said I would make patterns with silverware. Fascinated, she started leaving piles around the house with different themes: clothes, colors, blocks, fabrics, and I would create patterns with her offerings in each room of the house. “Most folks thought you were touched in the head.”

“Well, am I?”

“Likely we both are.”

I recorded the days and times of my visits to the bay with the number of bodies, along with any other significant observations that might give me pause. For the first several months I couldn’t figure on a pattern, hell, I couldn’t even discern how the sea was coughing up the bodies. It eventually occurred to me that I had only ever visited the cove during the day, so I started sneaking out at night. I’d take my leave for bed earlier than normal, telling Mama that I must be growing and needed more rest. She seemed pacified, and I thought I had her fixed, until I came home before dawn one morn to find her sitting in my room with a cup of hot tea held out for me. “What’s the story, my girl?”

“You won’t believe me, Mama.”

Visiting the cove at night granted me the ability to discover the manner in which the bodies reached the shore. Whales were bringing children into the cove. Well, as close as they could. The inflow of the current seems to bring the bodies fully to shore thereafter. It took me awhile to figure on the whales, what with the dark and all, but their blowholes are relatively easy to see and hear with the right moonlight. Sure enough, bodies always showed up the morning after I saw whales. I still cannot fathom how they manage to do it. Mama insisted that I bring her along one night. That pissed me off something fierce, that being my secret and all, but I was afraid she would find a way to prevent me from going if I refused.

“Dear glory Gemma, those gentle beasts are returning those babies to the land.”

“I know it, Mama, but I can’t figure out why.”

“Seems to me, my girl, the gentle beasts are simply returning them home.”

“Why would they do something like that?”

“Can’t know for certain. Maybe they are preserving the children while their souls are in transition before some predator tears them apart.”

I told Frankel about the whales. I like the idea that something bigger than us cares about the weakest of our species. I never have believed in God, I just can’t make sense out of an entity that can be everything and nothing all at once. Pick asshole. Maybe the whales are the closest thing to God I can figure on. I was disappointed there was no pattern to the bodies appearing, and I thought about not returning to the beach, but the whales started pulling me closer to them without doing anything at all. Maybe that is what God is like to some folks.

The bodies of the children fascinate Frankel more than the whales, but we share in the exploration, each for our own reasons. I suppose Frankel is working something out with whomever his God is, as well. I think the bodies are macabre, what with their swollen faces, and the flies, those blasted flies… the sound of them buzzing and humming, landing on an eyelid or the nose of a small child that can’t defend themselves of it. I wonder what the insides of them look like, are they rotted like Mama’s peaches, or are their hearts still somehow whole and preserved? They sure smell rotten.

“I think they are fascinating.”

“I think they stink.”

“Have some respect Gemma, Jesus.”

I like when Frankel is frustrated because he lowers his head and looks up at you with his big hazel doe eyes and gently shakes his head. I’m sure he gets that look on to express indignation but all it does to me is make my heart race and my tits harden. It doesn’t much matter to me what we do; if the whales stop bringing dead kids to the beach I would be equally as excited to find some other new excursion with him. My biggest worry is that we won’t always be able to find a new adventure that will keep Frankel interested, and that he will drift away and be lost to me before the very end. So I hold my breath when the smell of the bodies creeps up and I count to ten, one hundred, one thousand if necessary, just to give me that time with him. I beg the whales, please keep bringing the bodies. If there is a whale god, I ask it to please let me stand in the sand of this dream until the sky bleeds down around us into the sea and washes us away from the imprint of history.

~~~

The brilliance in having no real future is that people stop acting like pricks. Well, for the most part. School stopped holding sessions soon after we all learned of the great end. Stores eventually closed because no one wants to work, and those giant towers in cities with names I can’t pronounce emptied out quick as June lightning. It didn’t matter much to anybody that there is no definitive timeline to when the end is coming. “People have been looking for permission to relax and just be people,” Mama would say, “The Universe gave us that permission. It’s a gift.”

There were wars for awhile after we learned of the great end on some other corner of the planet where the people supposedly cared more about the end, but it didn’t last. Not even the local LEO’s stayed operational. It wasn’t but a few months after that one freakish snow day in December years back when they were harassing Frankel that most the officers resigned and threw their badges into the sea. It doesn’t make much sense to me, everyone is going to die one way or another before we all found out about the great end, and thatdoesn’t seem to give people permission to just be humans. “You gone on and figured it all out, ya did, my girl.”

Sure doesn’t feel like it.

Mama planted a small orchard of mature peach trees in the wake of learning about the great end. That doesn’t make sense to me either - fruit is rotting, what is the point in planting trees that yield damaged fruit? Mama says most things of importance don’t stop being beautiful or desirable just because they are destined to be short lived. And peaches have always been important to Mama. Says she wants to enjoy them straight up to the end, that she wants her last moments to be of me in her arms with a mouth full of peach flesh. Gimme a break here Mama, please. Her death day fantasy keeps me awake on the nights I don’t visit the whales, simply put because I want to be with Frankel at the very end. But how can I leave her alone? What sort of kid doesn’t want to be with their mama when they die? Maybe I can somehow work it out for us all three to be together. I’m confident as morning’s rooster though that if I leave her she will hunt me down in the afterlife and hitch her buggy to my horse for at least the next three thousand years.

In anyway, Mama always has people that help her to manage the workload of her little peach plot. There isn’t much to it, in all honesty, but she shares the modest yield and so there are always people with less than ourselves willing to help out as they pass through for the exchange of her surplus. What with all the stores having closed, most every family with food producing land around here share their yield, ‘cept for Cebil Marons further down from the Gulf. Mama says he tried to throw himself in front of a workhand’s tractor after his wife died fifteen years ago, and that the injuries left him angry and violent. Black cherry colored heart of bile and grief. When I see Cebil in town I think the deep scars on his face look like fat earthworms trying to eat their way up his skull. “Be kind Gemma.”

“I like earthworms, Mama.”

A lot of people started moving around after news of the end. It seems people didn’t want to waste no more time living in places they don’t love. As time passed a natural order took hold and people organically divided themselves into either home-dwellers or nomads. Home-dwellers provide temporary shelter, and often food. Nomads provide a service industry, and sometimes material goods they pick up and swap along the way to wherever it is they are going.

I always thought Mama and I would chase the wind and drift into the nomadic life given all the exploring we done when I was younger, but something changed, something mysterious to me. I used to think maybe it was as simple as Mama’s love for her peaches, but I catch her from time to time looking with a haunting desire out to where the sky touches unknown temptations, as if she is missing someone, or wants desperately to be somewhere else.

~~~

I think memory is a bizarre thing. I’ve been writing my thoughts and memories out here on these pages for the last few months because Mama said penning our stories is important. I have yet to feel the importance of it. What I do feel is confused, as if my memory has taken on a life of its own. I feel that my mind might not be trusted to remember correctly.

Take for instance the morning last week when I went down to the cove to meet Frankel and found his body had been washed up on the shore with three other wave-walking children. There are times when I play it back in my mind and can recall the small details, such as the clothing some of the other children wore- for example, I seem to recall that the smallest girl had on a pink dress with lace trimming that looked like it was in real fine condition before she walked into the waves. She was maybe five years old. I remember wondering about her life, wondering if she was crying when she walked into the waves, and who she died with. Her hair was dark brown and long. I admired the color of it just before I caught sight of Frankel, but the shock of seeing him made everything in my head feel like liquid after that.

For some time after I found his body I couldn’t recall the details of what he looked like laying there on the sand. To be honest, I can’t quite figure out why it is so important to remember it at all, but something inside me needed to call the details up and out. What I can work out is that he was on his belly, and his face was puffy and turned to the side, with those doe eyes of his staring through the hole his death instantly blew through me. It took me a few days to remember he had been wearing that shirt of his daddy’s I love - the one several sizes too large. It is the shirt I liked to imagine him filling out years down the road if there wasn’t an end to the world and we could have been together.

What I would like to forget about that morning is the feeling of hatred that started in the pit of my gut and worked its way up into the top of my head when I recognized him on the beach. I hated him for his cruelty. I hated the offense of his act. He must’ve figured my whales would bring him to this cove, to our cove. What kind of cruelty is that? Everything about him on that morning felt cruel from the shitty finality of death in his eyes, right down to the beauty the sea was unable to wash from his face.

For the first time since I’ve known about the great end, I guess it is fair to say that I’ve been grieving possibility. Possibility, the mother to hope, I’ve heard people say. I got to thinking that part of the reason my grief feels so acidic in my guts is because I’ve created stories in my mind about the possibility of the world continuing, and what Frankel and I might find to do with the freedom of that. It feels silly now. I think I will grieve the death of those stories as much as I will grieve him. “There ain’t no possibility quite so inspiring as what brought us to possibility in the first place.”

“Talk sense, Mama.”

“Frankel inspired you.”

She’s right about that. It helps me to forgive him a little bit.

Mama told me after that horrid day when I found Frankel that we haven’t left home and taken to the nomadic life because she wanted me to have a story with him. She wanted me to have some semblance of what a teenager might experience if the great end wasn’t looming overhead like an angry thunderhead. She said we can leave now if we find ourselves aching to chase the wind again. Something in that feels right. I’ve thought about walking into the sea, like Frankel, but the truth is there’s too much of Mama in me that is aching to live out the mystery of all this.

So here in my last entry I’m going to tell you my truth about the looming great end: I won’t mind at all if the great end happens in my lifetime. I desperately want to bear witness to it. And if it happens, I’m pretty certain it will feel good and right to leave this life with Mama. I suspect if we find ourselves someplace that doesn’t have peaches we will find something equally as wonderful to enjoy while we hold onto one another real tight, both scared and eager, to see what happens next. I do wish I could leave this entry with a few sentences on the big meaning of life as I see it through the lense of these times, but when it comes down to it, I don’t think there is just one big meaning. I don’t think life is that simple, or that complicated.

The world changes, and people change right along with it.

And that suits me just fine.