Issue 11: August 2007.
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Home > Issue 11: August 2007 > ShortShort
The Symptoms of the End
by Doug Cornett
1
The streets will be overrun with maniacs on stolen bikes, weaving in and out of giant rocks in the shapes of people long ignored. Nobody will have any idea what time it is except that they are late, and have been for the last hour or so. The distinction between those “at work” and “on vacation” will vanish. Children will drive cars, poorly, and grown-ups will try to remember how to run. Trains will lurch free of their tracks and smash through city blocks in search of peace and quiet, which they won’t find except in the dark center of some European forest, or at the bottom of an ocean that no one ever knew existed. Slow dances will be abandoned.
Universal fatigue. Dry mouth.
2
All vegetation will casually bow out of existence. Manufactured pieces of scenery taken from TV sitcoms will be erected on the sides of roads in its place. Small talk will be replaced by Big talk, which will consist solely of calling each other’s holy figures “Fags.” Condemned skyscrapers will finally find their voice and cry out for help, but no one will care to hear the horror of one rock falling into a thousand others. The Internet will become a graveyard, populated only by the personal pages of the recently deceased. Nobody will even try to understand classical music anymore.
Headaches. Memory loss. Hysteria.
3
The stealing of milk money will go global, involving weapons named after monsters from Greek mythology. The Saturday morning cartoons will become a litany of cosmetics underscored by the slow recorded sound of the last ocean on earth drying up into a crater. All the actors in the world will suddenly spring into an impromptu portrayal of “The Dawn of Man,” though none will be off-book, and the acting will be juvenile. Amateur magicians with names like Greg Mysterious and Doran Wonderhouse will perform amazing acts of disappearance and nobody will notice. They’ll wander the streets with rusted saws, desperate for volunteers to be divided and, after applause, made whole again. But all belief in magic will suddenly cease along with the necessity for three square meals and conversations about the moon.
Hearing loss. Feelings of inconsolable vastness.
4
The young, in a spot-on impersonation of old age, will begin to die out in mass numbers. Doctors’ offices will be crowded with patients complaining of painful memories, sore legs. Beautiful people everywhere will spend their last remaining moments staring hard at themselves in the mirror, trying to burn the image into their minds to keep with them for eternity, to remind themselves that once they were considered something to consider. But in the indifferent afterlife nobody looks like anything, except maybe an umbrella on fire. And in the final spectacle, all the worst qualities of the best people you know will be displayed in statistical form on stadium jumbotrons across the nation.
Euphoria.
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