“Do you think they hear us?”
The walls and floor are aging now, the light still juddering through its phases like a movie from a projector, until the drywall starts crumbling, spiderwebbed with vines and weeds. From those vines, flowers blossom and wither and grow back and die again. Seasons stretch into years stretch into decades stretch into centuries, all in moments, while I can hear Beau’s breath, make out his edges through the millisecond of dark before another morning comes.
“I don’t think there’s anyone left to hear us,” Beau says.
He’s right. I laugh because I don’t know what else to do. We’re standing at the end of the world, light looping over us.
He moves closer to me, and the pressure in my stomach disappears, the light falling away to leave us together in my closet in the dark. My breathing feels shallow now. I can barely see Beau towering over me, but I can feel him. I can still feel his kiss on my lips, and I’m acutely aware of the distance from his mouth to mine.
And then there’s no distance. My back is against the closet door, and Beau’s kissing me slowly, softly, his roughened hands on my stomach, mine tangling in his hair. His hands glide up to my neck, his fingers burrowing into my skin then sliding gently down the sides of my throat to my collarbones. As before, the light passes over us, but this time my stomach lifts like I’m falling through space and the sun is rising up in the west, just outside the closet window and falling down behind the house, full night cycling into sunset then midday and morning.
When the kiss ends, we stay there for a while, my heart still thundering as the sun cycles west to east again and again, a Ferris wheel of color twirling around us. An earlier version of me moves backward between the closet and the bedroom, an impossibly fast blur of brown. The sensation of being pulled backward through water works against my legs and back.
Down in the cul-de-sac, sparks of light rise off the ground, drawing together high in the sky to form a blossom of colorful fire—fireworks.
We’ve reached the fourth of July, and when all the fireworks have been undone, full night swallows us again. Our breath the only sound in the dark, his hands on mine the only thing grounding me.
“Show me how to do that,” I whisper.
He looks out the window. “I think you are doing that.”
He kisses me again, lifting me up against the door, and the world speeds forward once more. This time when it reaches the age of crumbling walls and reaching vines, I try to hold it there around us. I try to hold us there, at the end of the world.
“A long time ago, there was a drought,” I tell Beau. We’re lying in the closet on our sides, his arm draped over my waist, hand resting on the back of my thigh. “And all the water dried up, every creek and stream, every river and lake, and the ocean surrounding America.
“The people became hungry and thirsty, so they wandered the world, looking for anything they could eat or drink. But when they found dead fish and animals where the water had been, they became angry. They blamed the animals for the drought, and they began to hack at their dead bodies, pulling them into pieces and flinging them around in their rage.
“This went on for some time, until a strong wind passed over them, and the people froze and looked up. They saw a man, carried by the wind, coming down to them. When he touched the earth, he spoke. ‘You’ve acted as fools,’ he told them. ‘You’ve abused me and each other and all that I created for you to enjoy and care for.’
“Then the man held out a leaf, and four drops of water fell from it to the earth. The water spread out from there, covering all the land in a flood. The man then chose several people to follow him up a mountain, and as the water continued to rise, the man spoke to the mountain and made it rise too, carrying the people to safety.
“They stayed on the mountain for four days before the floods retreated, leaving all the earth green again where it had gone dry. The man led the people back down from the mountain and they saw that the people who had stayed below the water had not drowned, but had been reborn as fish and alligators and other animals, so great in number that the empty earth was filled again.
“In this way the man remade the world, righting every wrong.”
“The end?” Beau says, running his hand down my side.
“Or the beginning,” I say, “depending on how you look at it. That’s what Grandmother used to say, anyway.”
He turns onto his back and I lay my head on his shoulder, resting my hand on his chest and feeling every breath pass through his lungs. “I’ll help you any way I can,” he says. “Finding her before you go, I mean.”
Right now the thought of leaving makes me want to dig my hands into Beau and freeze time around us. I turn to burrow into his T-shirt and breathe him in.
“I would’ve drowned in that flood,” he says, and I sit up abruptly.