“Did you at least find something usable?” The tired boy with hair in his eyes asked, searching her face and the bag she carried for something edible… not that he would ever in a million years eat her. Well, if it came to it and she died tragically and it was his last option or something he might. He’d been forced to think about that. That’s what the end of the world does to a person.
“Not really,” she replied. “Everything is still burnt to a crisp. But I did find a bit of sunshine!! It was bouncing around that cave with the pond we found last week. I think the reflection of the water traps it… and now I’ve got it in here.” She pulled out her mason jar, smiling happily. Not knowing that the boy was staring at the meat of her hands with an animalistic sort of hunger.
Inside the glass was a thick, gelatinous mucous. Viscous and clear, and distinctly biological, like a primordial goo. The boy sometimes imagined that it was the beginning of everything, just as it had been the end. If only he could be around for the next billion years while the goo learned to evolve and grow a sun and animals and plants and everything they needed to make the earth Earth, again.
The girl held the jar up higher and began to hum. She learned this tactic while clambering over sticky wet rocks on the coast of Maine, plucking snails from their tenacious cling-posts at low tide, next to the barnacles and cast-off seaweed drying crispy in the sun. She held the snail on the palm of her hand and watched it tuck itself in deeper, hoping to escape notice… and the digestive tract of animals larger than itself.
Taking a deep belly breath, the girl closed her mouth and let a low, throbbing hum climb up out of her stomach and through the seal of her lips. It’s a low, pulsing, organic sound, mimicking the rise and swell of the underwater tide. And the snail begins to move. It’s just a watery, dark door sliding closer to the opening of the shell at first, but as the crooning continues, it slowly unravels itself from within the tiny confines of its house to let two miniscule antennae escape as it pokes out to see what there is to see, which ought to be the sea.
The hum imitates the pulsing sound of underwater surf. At high tide, when the snail’s clinging place is covered with water, the croon of ocean tide is the all-clear signal to the petite sea-folk that they are free to move about the cabin.
When the girl runs out of breath and breaks her ocean song, the snail quickly beats a retreat into his house and slams the door; he won’t be so clueless the next time she tries it.
And now the girls stands in the center of a vast and gray desert, no end in sight, and hums to the sun. Well, to what’s left of it. That tired old star did its best to make it through all the obligatory life stages but wasn’t motivated enough to stick with it straight through to white dwarf. He ended up cutting class somewhere around planetary nebulae and the radioactive fallout fried almost everything (and everyone) on Planet Home to a crispy, crusty, unusable surface. The girl and the boy were all that were left. They lost their real names in the scattering, but had taken to calling each other Adam and Eve because they thought it was kind of appropriate but mostly funny. The funny part was that there was no garden of Eden or a tree of life to, you know, like, feed or protect them or let them walk with god or whoever. Sucks.
The goo in the mason jar began to move. Motion is meaningless until you’ve seen the very molecules and substance of atoms excite themselves and swim or fly or crawl as they scatter and then recollect themselves in a dance older than anything. Seeing the space which exists in the being and fiber of even the most solid of solids is enough to unseat the well-founded beliefs of preachermen and philosophers. This is what they saw.
The girl paused to suck in another breath and the movement in the jar slowed, but as soon as her hum and thrum began again a light formed in the center of the goo and pulsed in time with her heartbeat and it grew and glowed, reaching thin arms from the walls of the jar to touch both their faces and for the briefest of moments, he forgot his hunger and she forgot her loneliness and they were simply neighboring stars, caressing each other with the arms of their celestial bodies and the sun was their center.
She stopped to catch her breath and they watched the light simmer and close in on itself, much in the way its parent did at the end of its life.
And Adam and Eve saw all that they had made and they smiled and it was good.