Two Strangers at the End

Flash Fiction by Victoria Ashleigh Rose

The two strangers held onto the metal bars and looked across the water. It would be coming soon, they knew it. That's what led them here, to this beach on this night where the looming sky was at its clearest.

They would be able to see it perfectly from this view, and yet, they were the only ones here. Perhaps everyone else was with their families, counting down the moments left of clarity; the moments before everything would be gone, but the two of them had minds of their own, ones that led them to the same corner of the world. The girl had never been anywhere else, really. Her mother named her Vienna, like the place, and promised to take her there one day, but this was the farthest point on the map that she’d ever been to—this desolate beach barely an hour from her home, where she could listen to the orchestra of waves crashing like cymbals through the storm—and it wasn’t raining tonight, but it might as well have been.

The boy, Dion like Dionysus, never came here on rainy nights—only drunken ones—and he would swallow salty seawater to feel the burn on his tongue until it made him desperate enough for hydration to believe that he wanted to live. He was all-too sober now, sober enough to feel it in his chest when his loved ones all went to their better loved ones to pray or to cheers to the end of it all. His best friend told him that drinking salt water would definitely do him in someday; maybe now was the time to try. There was a shared look between the two strangers: a brimming emptiness. Eyes interlocking to briefly challenge time to a duel, to interrupt the impending finale, to wonder about happenstance, and fate, and if this exchange counted as meeting each other… and if this is what it meant to be doomed from the start. But there were no words spoken, just glimmering hopelessness splitting their faces into grins, then the lifting of shirts and the kicking of sand before running towards the waves. One last sensation to fill the void of this life, one last chance to find the meaning in the depths, before the world ends, and the sky falls into the sea.

And they were here, together.