What We Leave Behind

I.

He stood at the edge of what all remained of the world. Black and total nothingness stretched around him like a dead sea. He held out his hand and watched the darkness lap at his fingers. There was no cold. There was no heat. There was only absence. He withdrew his hand and looked at it in the graying light. All his fingers were still there. He flexed them. Behind him, the house stood on its hill like something left after a flood.

II.

The tomato plants grew as if nothing had changed. Six of them. Their leaves were dark and lustrous under the red humming growth lights. He touched them each morning. Talked to them. Counted the fruit. Plucked the yellowing leaves. His father’s father had kept tomato plants. Had built this house board by board and nail by nail and had filled notebooks after notebooks with his own observations. The old man’s chair still sat on the porch. Still rocked. The leather of his notebooks still warm to the touch as if spiking a fever of knowing.

In the kitchen, a cup of coffee had gone cold. The mug was white against the dark wood. Steam was long dead. He watched it. Thought about heating it. Thought about the day the power would fail. Thought about heat and light and all the things man had stolen from the universe that the universe now aimed to take back.

III.

The notebook lay open in his lap. He wrote in it with a carpenter’s pencil. Wrote about the tomatoes. About the taste of coffee. About the way chalk felt and clacked against the blackboard when he’d stood before his students and tried to explain the way the universe worked. How the laws one day broke.

The pencil scratched against paper, and the sound was like mice scurrying in the walls. Was like insects struggling against death. It was the sound the world itself made as it wrote its own epitaph.

He wrote until the pencil grew short. Wrote until the words blurred. Wrote because there was nothing else to do.

IV.

When the lights died, he sat in darkness as absolute and total as the void outside. The generator’s death rattle had echoed through the house’s frame — once, twice, then silence.

He felt his way to the porch, to his old man’s chair. The rocker’s bones creaked like his own. The notebook still lay open in his lap, though he could no longer see the pages. Still, he wrote. The pencil gouging deep. Writing blind what blind things might read. The darkness moved closer. Patient as gods. Hungry as time.

The void took the garden first. Then the steps. Then the porch boards beneath his feet. The chair rocked on nothing. The pencil wrote on paper that grew warm with its own light. He wrote until the darkness took his hands. Wrote until it took the world. Wrote until there was nothing left to write with and nothing left to write about and nothing left to write upon.

And still he wrote.

V.

In the nothing that remained, a scratch of graphite on cotton paper held meaning like a coal holds fire.

We existed.

We were here.

The darkness could not take what it could not understand.

And so the words remained.