Blood is everywhere on this final hour of my final night. The ground gurgling from it; denuded trees drizzling with it—like red maple syrup; and strewn body parts being drained of it—gravity at work. Nature’s dramatization of the end in progress, a mental spectacle of death’s metaphor.
Red streaks the sky with a neon fluorescence; plumes of black smoke twisting into funnels, crisscrossing the expanse, headed eastbound along invisible rivers of wind. Concussive blasts multiply along the horizon, shattering my brain; the last stands of the living, dying, and hanging in limbo; the resilience of mind over matter, to observe one’s mind on self-destruct—its last hurrah!
My beat-up 87 Oldsmobile, long since dismembered but fondly remembered, returned to service for this final hour; mom in the passenger seat, my dark haired ex-lover in the back, still smiling and tormenting with her good looks, long past her demise.
No traffic, but slow going on this final hour; bones and shrapnel cracking underneath rolling, flattened rubber. “Where to, Mom?” I say. “The world is almost gone, nuked to smithereens, but we’re hanging on to the tatters. Good for us, right?”
“We’re covered in it, hon,” she says. “All that fallout, inside our nostrils and lungs and brain, like poison pollen. If it doesn’t kill us, we’ll worry ourselves to death over it, wasting your final hour.”
Smirking, I turn towards her, “Isn’t that just like you, Mom? Always worrying…worry, worry, worry! The shrink told me that excessive worry is a generational thing for us Jewish folks, passed down from the Holocaust days, maybe even further back. Grandpa never mentioned anything, though: not the massacres at Kiev and Odessa, his childhood legacy. Wonder what he’d say, having watched all that carnage on CNN and now this final nightmare; different eras and venues, but same thing: blood, guts, evil, fear, injustice, and a pesky anxiety disorder to boot!”
“Hon, don’t blame your father and me, nor the grandfolks, for your anxiety. This is your life, your nightmare. You’ve dragged me along for the ride, as always, showing me your private hell—guilt tripping me with it. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it, but don’t include me or that girl in the back.”
“Sorry Mom, not my intention to make you feel bad. Well, maybe a little bit. Hey, you look younger than me now, how about that?”
Mom retorts while fading, “You’ve been carrying me for too long, and now you’re older than my death on this final hour of your final night. Do the math, man!”
“Man?”
The dark haired one giggles boisterously in the background, on my final hour of my final night. The last trickles of life blood keeping me plugged in and listening, finishing out my time here, the lifetime sentence about to end like a blindfolded execution. Hearing is the last sense to go—the grand finale!
© 2023 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Notes from David 