Little Apocalypses

Aparna Paul

one.

Fall is the season of memory, or so my mother always told me. Every leaf turns in its delicate dance with death. They beckon us to recall what the world looked like flush with green newness, what it looks like revealing grey emptiness. My mother was scared of the winter, of an infinite dark sky, ashes falling from the clouds.

In the fall, she would instead ask me to remember. Every autumnal equinox, she walked into my room and fed me a fairy tale, something warm to press back against the cold and dark of the night. It would begin like this:

“This is a story about the end of the world.”

And it always was. When I was six, this was the equinox story she told me:

“This is a story about the end of the world. There’s a fault line that runs the length of a state, through the middle of a city. And one day, but I don’t know when, it’s going to split it all down the center. This is a city with buildings that reach to the sky like trembling fingers, and buses crawling its streets like beetles in the garden, and a liveliness, a pulse of history. It’s always raining in the city, I think, and no one dares look towards the precipitous heavens.”

She took my hand then, and I almost lost the thread of the story, distracted by the way her fingernail curved around the tip of her middle finger, hugging close to the dry skin there.

“One day, this fault line shivers. Everyone is looking at the ground, they see the way it ripples below their feet. They look up then, in fear. They look at the person on the sidewalk next to them, at the table to their right, across the aisle on the bus. Their mouths are pressed closed, but their eyes have changed. Their eyes are open now. ‘Did you feel that?’ their eyes ask. Not ‘did you see the way the ground shook.’ Not ‘did you hear the way the earth groaned.’ Did you feel that? Did you feel it, same as I, the way the world felt it too? Did you feel it like a rumbling sadness, or a shaking anger, or something a little like love?

“You know the rest, I’m sure. The world split open like an egg. The streets ripped themselves apart. The cars all fell into the abyss, and the buildings, and the cobblestones, and the sewer grates, and the fire hydrants, and the everything, the all of it, the things that they built and called indestructible. When it was all done falling into the chasm, even some people, I think, the remaining few looked at each other, really looked, and they said, did you feel it, too? Do you know where we go next? And even if they couldn’t answer the question then, they gazed back at each other, and they tried to find an answer in the ruins.

“That’s how the world ends, tonight,” she whispered, and kissed me on the forehead. She turned out the lamp, and stood in my doorway, a silhouette against the light in the hall. She looked over her shoulder in a promise to me—to our home—that she would return, as if she would be gone a long time. The next morning, of course, she opened the door and gently shook me out of the little apocalypses in my dreams.

two.

In the fall of my seventeenth year, the skies greyed and the leaves turned with an urgency I’d never seen before. The world was dry as a bone, the sweet summer humidity sucked away as cleanly as marrow. Life felt empty, empty, empty, but when I stumbled home on the equinox, I was full, so full, of light and laughter and warmth. A little too much liquor. A rose would envy the blooms of my cheeks.

I pressed open the door, ever so quiet, and there she was on the couch. Wrapped in a blanket, gaze fixed on the wall. I was swaying in my too-tall black boots, trying to remember what day it was, when she turned to me, holding out a glass of water. She made me take off my shoes, walked me up the stairs.

She was all sighs and tired eyes, and I didn’t know it then, but there was nothing like disapproval there. There was only joy and reassurance in her heart, even if it didn’t know how to make itself known.

I sat on the bed, toed off my socks, my shoulders readying to flinch against her reprimand. But instead: “This story is about the end of the world,” she said. I tried to stop her, thinking of the personal statements and exam scores and recommendation letters on the hard drive of the downstairs computer.

I don’t need any other stories, I thought. I know my own, and I know how I’ve written it. I know how the rest of the words will write themselves—“And I don’t need to hear the stories you’re going to say.” She looked at me, then, her eyes dark and sorrowed and liquid, and she refused to stop.

“This story is about the end of the world. It started with the birds. They took to the skies, a streak across the blue, a cloud, if a cloud could be angry. Then the deer, crossing the road in front of cars. They were already limping, great lacerations in their haunches, fear in their eyes. And all the people in the town, they only noticed the intricacy of the antlers, not the way that they stared.

“The world was trying to share the most difficult truth in the universe: its heart was broken. When our hearts are broken, we feel like we only know brokenness. Everything that we touch, we think, breaks too. That is the greatest tragedy, that we blind ourselves to reality. Nothing is broken because we have touched it. It is transformed. It is made anew. The world, too, wants to transform, wants to make anew. The world is dry, and searing, and wounded. From there, it’s only a small step to wildfire. The blaze sweeps over our little lives, and its heart, its heart, wants nothing more than to feel warm, to share its warmth, to transform and make anew the coldness that is locked away in each of us. It does make something new, but this story isn’t about that. It’s about the end of the world, the ashes and the smoke and a hand pushing out of the scorched earth and into the steaming air, always, always reaching for the light, and reaching for each other.”

She stood, paused at the door, looked back. “Good night,” she whispered, but I was already falling, the alcohol dulling and dizzying the room. When the lightning bolt moon woke me up before the dawn, I’d already forgotten that she sat on the bed, that she told me a story. The blankets were disarrayed, and there was no impression of her in the mattress.

three.

When I was 27, there was no moon on the equinox. Nothing but silent dark. Earlier, I had stormed into my apartment, my roommate startling at the timbre of my footsteps. “Are you okay?” she asked, the paused TV a glossy reflection on her wide eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, leaning against the counter. “My mom and I got into an argument.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. What mothers and daughters always fight about, I guess. How to survive.” She blinked at me, inviting more explanation, but I had nothing left to give.

Instead, I laid in bed under the moonless sky, looking out at the streetlamp across the road, its brilliant orange Cyclops eye a beacon in the misty dark. What does the light illuminate, and what does it leave in the dark? My mother, in a fluorescent-bright kitchen, all the light in the world, and the shadows spiraling from the man across the scarred wooden table. My voice, inherited from the greatest storyteller I knew. In each exaltation and whisper and pause, in each valley and peak, she was there. All those cadences, and I couldn’t convince her to leave.

Apocalypses abound. The end of the world is unnervingly quiet, static on a telephone wire. Light slanted across my curious eyes, even as they closed, even as I slipped away.

In the morning, a voicemail: “This story is about the end of the world. This time, it happens in a city on a coast, where the ocean hugs the land. The ocean loves too much, if there were such a thing. It loves the timid ground and the blazing skies, but most of all, it loves the moon. But this isn’t a story about the ocean, or the moon, or love. It’s a story about the winter, which threatens to freeze the waters and the people and the everything into something static and immovable. Before all that, though, in this city on the coast, life is good. It’s a city that you can always find a parking spot in. A city that has the best sandwich in the whole world right around the corner. A city that makes your legs ache because you never want to stop walking it. Who lives here? Let me tell you. People who have forgotten what love is, almost. Every night, they look out at the ocean, and they see the way that it crashes on the shore, and it reaches for the moon, and they wonder what it feels like to yearn and to want and to love.

“Until one night, the ocean rises, the wind stirs it into hurricane, and the waters crash against the buildings, they swallow until there’s nothing left, nothing but an I wonder why the ocean moves just so echoing in the empty air. Good night, my love.”

four.

A decade later, I picked up the phone when my mother called. She was living with my estranged brother; we were connected by a straight line interstate, with an impossible ocean of time and space stretching between us. I couldn’t remember what the backs of her hands looked like. When her voice crackled out of the faraway silence, her words were laced with a distress I only heard when she talked about the winter. “Get me out of here,” she said, and it was the only time in my whole life that she had ever called me and told me, exactly, in no uncertain terms, what she wanted.

I crossed two state borders that evening, helped her pack, noticed how the dry skin around her middle finger was peeling even worse than it was twelve years ago, how the fingernail on her left thumb was ridged and distressed. I remembered more than I thought I did. I packed faster, hands folding and compressing and pushing down, the only place I knew how to direct my force.

In the car, speeding against the twilight, we were quiet, only the steady hum of the fan between us. The road stretched out, languid and lazy beyond the windshield. There were too many cars on the highway for an arbitrary Tuesday twilight, and my shoulders were hunched, fingers tight.

A car swerved into the lane ahead of us, close, close, close, like the metal was aching to be touched, even if it meant being destroyed, and I pressed against the brakes with too much force.

The silence between us was tense, after, and I said, “I’m sorry.” She looked at me, and I could feel her eyes on me, in the weighted way that mothers look at daughters, with hope and love and fear. “I know,” she said. A pause. “This is a story about the end of the world.”

five.

At thirty-eight, on the equinox, I don’t understand what she’s saying. Her eyes are as clear and bright as always, but her traitorous tongue speaks words beyond my scope. A language I never learned. The soft rhythms and smooth vowels of her childhood, narratives beyond my grasp, a brief word here or there, but nothing like a story.

And as my confusion grows, her panic becomes more pronounced. Quivering words and shaking hands and a crease between her brows. She takes my fingers in her own, wraps them tightly, tries to press the words between our skin since the air was so inadequate. I hold onto her.

I say:

“This is a story about the end of the world. Imagine a mother and a daughter. Imagine two women, with the darkness of a whole universe pressing against them. Imagine the light between them, the thing that keeps them awake, and alive. The thing that puts them to sleep, without any fear at all.

“Can you picture this? But how is this the end of the world, you wonder? How is this anything except beautiful? It’s the end of the world, you see, because that galaxy between them is gone. The thing that they created together, the landscapes and the oceans and the valleys and the hills and the jungles and the deserts and the trenches and the caves, it’s not there anymore. The world ended. Questions, questions, questions, and not an answer to be found. Fall is the season of memory. Every equinox, you asked me to remember. And I do, I finally do.”

When she closes her eyes, the world ends.