Short Stories

The Last Days

Doubts roamed his head, but it was expected when he was seemingly the last person alive. Seemingly. It was those types of thoughts that were doubts.

Somewhere out there, most likely, were tribes, groups - people. For some reason, they just weren't near him. He wasn't sure why. Surely someone had to be alive near him. It would only be logical for that to be the case, so why couldn't he find anyone?

Why was he so frighteningly alone at a time like this? Where were the signs of life, the signs pointing him in the direction of groups and safety?

Why were they able to group together, but he wasn't? Why was he the one to be alone?

The questions bugged him, but he shook the thoughts out and continued his scavenging trip.

Glass broke under the pressure of his dirty, brown boots. Whistles of the wind brushed against his ears. Had it been any other day, subtracting the broken windows and obvious abandonment of the town, he would have figured it was like any other day. Trees and grass still kept the look of healthy growth, only the occasional building had broken windows, and only a few cars looked beaten down from individuals attempting to flee the destruction. No one would have known what happened.

Memories served to acknowledge that it did, whether he liked it or not. His eyes witnessed the carnage, and those events were ones he certainly could not forget no matter how much he tried. It replayed whenever he closed his eyes. But, strangely, a post-apocalypse was the least of his worries and fears.

The growing loneliness in the pits of his stomach and soul was at the top of his list. No matter where he went, there was just silence. No one replied to him, not even the mannequins that he spoke to - though, that was expected deep down. No matter how much he willed himself to hallucinate people, he couldn't. He wasn't crazy enough for it. He couldn't even imagine the breezes carrying voices, not even nearly inaudibly.

Ra'mon was absolutely alone, and his only friend was loneliness.

He laughed quietly to himself, huddled under a desk. He tried, though barely and vaguely, to imagine the people that once worked in the law firm. Imagery of a small man, black hair thinning, and weary eyes a dying brown, came to mind. A black tailored suit was squeezed onto his portly frame, maintaining the look of professionalism that came with practice and money. Inheritance and youth spent at prestigious academies studying what his father and his father's father did too.

A woman with strawberry blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, though proverbial, acted as a secretary. She took her job seriously even though she had higher aspirations. In a few years time, she would leave and seek out the journalistic career of reporting reality, and not just some small segments on makeup and cultural appropriation. She wanted to write about the women in Yemen that only counted as 1/2 witness in court cases, the very thing true feminists were fighting against.

Ra'mon laughed again, only this time he sounded completely insane. The depth that he gave to the characters of his imagination humored him, and ironically, he wished he had as much. Instead, he was just a gradually becoming madman thriving for the day under an abandoned desk in a meeting room, watching the sun fall below the window lines.

With a yawn, he curled up into a ball and fell asleep. He did it for several days, which then turned into a week, and then a month. His loneliness became even more obvious and frightening until it became a shadowy monster that chased after him every time the sun went down. Anxiety became the bane of his existence and loneliness befriended it.

It wasn't long before he found himself holding a gun in hand, and not long after loading it. He spent more days just staring at it, waiting for something.

But then he realized what he was waiting on. Isolation crawled up and down his body like animals under his skin. He took the minimalistic bravery, the counterintuitive resultant that pressed itself as isolation's companion, and did what he believed he should have done a long time ago.

He sat in that same office, tears streaming down his face, as he put the muzzle into his mouth and fired.