Fall Remains

Author’s Note: This is a continuation of sorts, a “sequel” if you will. Please read “Summer Long” by David Antrobus before reading this story. You can find it HERE:

Thank you, and enjoy.

E.

Fall. And fall he would; a rock into a pond. His passing would be marked by the ebb and flow of the tide. He held no false pretense of what his death would mean. When he hit the water, there would be no butterfly effect, no small ripples ever growing to a tsunami somewhere in a far off land. Splash, he’d land, and the liquid dunes would soon fade, like a heart monitor signaling the fading of a broken muscle. Beep. Peak. Beep. Flatten. And so it would go, until that line was nothing more than static neon segmenting the blackest of worlds.

Loss rides high on the wings of regret, and a bird looking for food will soon descend. Come the cold embrace of a wintery love after the fall; he would be no more. Seasons could not change without the death of the one before it. Those waves he rushed towards would envelope him like a mother soothing a child. Endings were made for stories, and his was already told.

That poor girl on the park bench beckoned, figuratively. She would go on, he had no doubt. Happiness would either make itself known, or she would eventually come to know fall with all its stunning endings. She was of no consequence now. All that was left was the bridge behind him, a cold railing pressing against his back like a corpses’ palm.

Periphery images, cones of light thrown by passing cars, came and went. Would there be a final light at the end? he wondered. One so miniscule and bereft of warmth that he would turn away from it and seek to find a source of heat. Would he travel down, down, down, `til he struck bedrock and blasted his image upon the stone like a man standing between a wall and the disbursement of an atom bombs’ payload? His crumbling facade turned to a shadowy reminder, a charcoal relief etched on brick.

Life had stolen everything from him, and now, he chose to steal life from himself. Dragging the water below, they would find a man sated for the first time in his existence, for he had finally accomplished something. He’d won. Rigor would set his smile and that rictus would serve as the epitaph – the sheer necessity – of his passing. They would ask, “What of this Cheshire’s grin? What of this man?” And time would answer, “Nothing. Not any more.”

As a child, he’d hoped. Adulthood had come and offered nothing but bleak reality. Forget the flowers, where had all the innocence gone? Cradle’s fell with a cacophony that shattered eardrums and faith alike with a thundering finality. Growing up had been like striking every branch on the way down, as if he had traversed a line of men that wailed on him with yardsticks. Being born at the highest point of that tree had lent him a view of a far off horizon, one where the sun set and advent night bled into the world like ink being mopped up by cotton. The evolution from dusk to full-fledged evening came with the promise of morning. His existence proved that what actually came was mourning.

The girl on the park bench had reminded him of Winter, how she’d come on frosty but left with a spring about her. But if he were to see Winter again, he must end. And so the cycle would remain unbroken, undeterred by seasons come and gone, a vagrant begging for change when he could no longer offer.

The sun dove head first into the waters before him. He gave that celestial body a perfect ten, for the waters remained undisturbed. The sky blended blues with yellows; the first speakings of twilight’s approach whispered in his ears.

“Hey, Partner? Whatcha doin out there?” That voice, unfamiliar and unexpected, died in his ears, meant nothing to him.

“I think he means to jump, Stan!”

“Stay in the car. Call the cops. Hey! Hey, Partner!”

That smile the divers would find, crept across his face. Partner, what an apt name. The absense of a partner spurred this decision in the first place, so to die a Partner seemed pleasant.

“Don’t do it. Come on, now! Step back!”

The wind picked up and carried the onlooker’s voice away. Air, still warm, still holding fast to a fleeing summer, rushed by him until finally he was poured over ice and set to chill.

Deaf and broken, he sank, the pain like an alarm clock set to stun. Someone had replaced his bones with shattered glass, the fools! Slowly, excruciatingly, he began to rise once more, back up into the world he wanted so bad to be gone from, to that place where Winter had yet to return, and it seemed, he would remain.