Everything Dies Now
Flash Fiction
by Victoria Ashleigh Rose
The world sweeps away life and paralyzes growth, as thick browns and brilliant oranges stain everything, and she weeps, worlds away from him.
Death is unkind that way; it is careless with its waves and its winds and its howls, it leaves you bare and clutching to the particles; the dried pieces, the remnants of what used to be. But not for him. For him, death is just something new. Death is the whole picture, everything staring back at you. Death is the collection of time, stopped, frozen, ended, but never over. Everything will always exist.
Death is change—disintegration, reconstruction, redesign. There will be something new again, and perhaps it will resemble what it did once, but what would be the beauty in that perfection? What makes immortality different from death if it cannot evolve, change, grow? There would only be pointlessness, but that’s all there seems to be for her now. She craves the seizing of time, and she looks for it. Perhaps that’s what this is; this nearing winter, this everlasting story, her tightening grip on his lifeless body, and then her weight on the ground he lays beneath. She sprawls out over him, on top of six feet of dirt, days away from his last words to her. The sound of his voice hasn't faded yet, not like the bright hues in flower petals have. She can still hear it—soft, steady, the way it was when he spoke to her under the autumn trees, his fingers tangled in hers. "Watch the leaves change colours with me," he'd said, his lips curling into something tired but true. She remembers the golden light filtering through the canopy, the crispness in the air, the way he had looked at her like she was the only thing that mattered. Most of the leaves have fallen now, scattered around her like the remnants of a promise neither of them could keep. But then she remembers—the way his hands had grown weak in hers, how his voice had thinned in the final days, the exhaustion in his eyes when he told her he was ready, even if she never would be. The warmth had drained from him faster than she could warm him, too soon for her to prepare for what it meant to hold onto something that could no longer hold back. The wind had carried the last breath between them, and now it carries the falling leaves, whispering their same quiet surrender. She presses her cheek to the frozen soil, desperate to feel the warmth of something that no longer gives it. Some leaves still cling to the trees that sprouted them, and they sway in the uncomfortable chill. They seem afraid to let go. She knows all about that, and she’s envious of them. They dangle on drying stems, but they know their fate, don’t they? They wave to each other with sorrowful goodbyes, but they know what’s coming. They understand what she doesn't. They know that they will become alive once again. That is the lost answer of humanity, isn’t it?
“What will become of you?” she says to him.
She knows he will become the dirt; that he will slowly decay as the bugs and the worms digest the wooden barrier that separates him from the earth. It’s so easy to forget that we are no different from the trees and the bugs and the strawberries, we are children of this planet all the same, yet we are so reluctant to give ourselves back to it.
Perhaps the leaves aren’t afraid to fall; perhaps they are more humble than us.
The snow will crisp the flaky ground soon, petrifying movement and fragility. Everything will cease, but it is not death; it is not endless. She can anticipate the snow, and some part of her looks forward to it. There will be no requirements for her to grow, to let go. With winter comes stagnation and rest. Perhaps his body will rest for a while. Maybe she will too.
She sits in the vacant graveyard, counting the abandoned tombs, their names fading with time, forgotten by those who once traced them with trembling fingers. She remembers when the grass here bore the weight of dapper black dress shoes, when a collection of mourners huddled beneath the same gray sky, their voices hushed and indistinct. Her grief had been lost among them, drowned in the collective sorrow of people who knew only fragments of him in comparison. Now, there is only silence, a vast emptiness stretching between the graves, between the past and the present, between her and him.
Somehow, she exists without him. He was something so necessary to her. He was the structure for her vines to climb up, to intertwine with, and she was so hopeful for the future she wove. It was intricate, like the cobwebs that now form in their bedroom. She still sees his imprint in the sheets she can’t bring herself to wash. She can’t sleep there anymore.
But she lives. She grows without him, and he fades, and she doesn’t mean for him to. She’s terrified of time’s continuum without him; she forgets that nothing disappears. But where does it go?
The snow and ice melt into water. Those crystal-like fragments dissipate and change just like the foliage they blanket over, and they never exist again quite as they did, but they continue in different ways. Everything becomes something new again. The water dissolves into the air, and the air carries it in beautiful displays of constant progression. There could never truly be stillness, could there? Then the rain comes, then hail, and snow and death, and we are miserable. Time carries with it all sorts of things, but who are we to escape it?
She watches the clouds now, spending her time trying to find the right way to look at things, trying not to see hatred, or death, or fall victim to grief like this. She tries to find the sky’s secrets, as if they will whisper answers back to her. The clouds have not brought winter yet, and she knows they will, but she still doesn’t know what’s to come. Her life will go on, she knows that too, but she seeks for a way to stay strong. She can’t sit at this grave forever, matching the stillness of him. She can’t braid the worlds in between them backwards until she’s in his arms again, but she can weave through her memories. She can strengthen them, blanket them in snow. She can let her roots coil around him so she’ll never have to go. How could she re-root herself now? Is she tethered by her fear or devotion? Does it matter?
Leaves need no answers as they drift to the ground. Maybe there’s faith in that.
Maybe her faith is that he sees her, from the clouds or foliage or through the worlds between them. She pushes off of the dry grass and stands up from the dirt, palming the headstone as a soft goodbye. Deep cold air fills her chest as she finds the strength to go home—or maybe it’s the courage—or the weakness. She doesn't know at all. But he sees her living on, trapped in the currents of time that he escaped from. He sees the way she cries for him, the way she aches, and yet, the way she will heal. He sees it as the collection of life, and he is grateful that time never slows; he is grateful that she’ll always grow, whether she means to or not.
