| Gayatri Allamsetty | October 2024 | Short Story |
In the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter, because nothing mattered any longer when everyone was gone and when the places he once knew were now unrecognisable and when the sky was finally so clear that he could see the Milky Way glittering across it every single night.
The End stretched across the world in a deadly, twisted mesh. He was the last one, the lone ranger, the solitary romantic figure. And he wanted to build something.
It didn’t matter, but nothing did, so if he were to spend the rest of his life traversing the globe looking for something he didn’t recognise — well, that would be nothing more to the universe than a speck of dust settling on a leaf. This was it. There was no long game, no final destination, no happy ending. Only him.
***
He had learned, very young, that he was quite content to sit cross-legged in one place and watch the world whirl around him in a colourful blur. A single ant could make its steady way across his knee, and he would gaze at it in wonder until it disappeared over the other side. He thought very hard and said very little. He would dream of the ant for days.
***
In all their horror and intricacy, the plants were extraordinarily beautiful. Sharp teeth and limbs that stretched, reached out for him. Sublime, his mind whispered to him. They towered over him, casting gentle shadows that made no suggestion of the violence they had birthed.
If I were a botanist, he found himself thinking, I could be quite happy. Worlds and worlds to explore and discover. But he was not a botanist. He was not anybody – not when there was no one to be somebody to.
But he knew this: he would build something, and it would last forever, and nothing would tear it down — not the rain or sun or plants or the end. Nothing at all. It was his single purpose, the reason he was left behind.
***
When it was all over, and he found himself trembling and alive, it was like leaving the house after a thunderstorm. It was like the world had finally slowed and come to a stop around him. He could unfold his limbs and touch things with reverent curiosity for the first time. It was so quiet he could have heard the footfall of an ant crawling across his knee.
At first he had simply laid down on the damp earth and watched the tangle of foliage around him until he could trace every line of it in his mind. Days and days had slipped by like sunlight. Then he stood up, drank the purest water he had ever tasted, and began life anew.
***
When he first heard the scream, it was like a rock had crashed through the delicate walls of his new life. It was so unfamiliar, so jarring, that it took him many long moments before he recognised it. Then, propelled by strange recollection of things he had long forgotten, he ran.
He avoided flailing branches and angry teeth with expert ease. He had always wondered at how easy it was to adapt to new worlds — it was like he had lived there all his life. Perhaps he had. Now, it served him well. He crawled through hydrangeas as large as boulders and broke out into a new world.
Time slowed down to a trickle. He had known that it was a human being who’d made that sound but that hadn’t prepared him for his first glimpse of another person since his new beginning.
The person standing before him was so unlike the dream he’d been wading through this whole time. Her very base composition seemed different than his own, like she’d crawled out of some ancient painting long forgotten, long destroyed. She glowed in the landscape. When she moved, swinging wildly towards him, flakes of her paint fragmented and settled in clouds around her.
“Who are you?” she breathed, and even as the world readjusted and settled in the new shape she had given it, he recognised the danger in her voice. Danger and anger and fear– all leaves on the same stalk.
“I’m-” he began, and then paused. He didn’t think of himself as a real person anymore. There was — here had been no reason to.
“You were screaming,” he said instead, “Do you… are you hurt?”
The words poured out of him without thought, like childhood lessons coming back to life. Physically, he was standing before this person, this wretched miracle. On the inside, he was aflame.
“No,” she snarled and made as if to move forward. For the first time, he noticed that she was holding something. An axe, it looked like, crudely fashioned.
“I haven’t seen anyone else,” he blurted out, “There’s nobody else here. You’re the first person I’ve seen.”
She stilled, looking at him with a considering gaze. The wildness about her tamed slightly.
“You are too,” she said, “I didn’t think anyone else was still alive.”
He flinched at the words.
“There’s nobody else here,” he repeated, feeling like a fool. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
“I know,” she said and turned away. He was suddenly filled with a horrible clawing fear, like if she left, he would be more alone than before and that would kill him. He was sure of it, he couldn’t do it, not when there had been a chance…
She didn’t leave through the tangle of vicious plants, now dormant. No, she raised her axe and with a vicious scream – rage, not pain, he realised vaguely – she brought it down on the head of the flytrap beside her. It writhed and fell to the ground with a sickening crunch. She turned back to him, panting and feral, so much more alive than he had ever been.
“It’s just us. And them,” she nodded at the heavy body beside her, “And I’m going to make sure there aren’t going to be any of them left.”
***
She didn’t leave, but she didn’t stay either. They came to an unspoken agreement about foraging for food; what each found, they would split. Some days they walked for miles in a prickly silence, looking for new places, new food. Mostly she disappeared, sometimes returning late into the evening, sometimes not. She was exhausted and grimly satisfied. And angry. Always angry, always burning with it. She didn’t tell him how she spent her days and he didn’t ask.
At nightfall, they reached a tentative peace. On some rare occasions, she’d speak to him, really speak to him. She told him how she’d been named after her mother. She’d had a sister once. And a dog. She’d loved plants until she didn’t. He didn’t think it was because she cared for him or even particularly trusted him. It was more of a release for her, than anything else. It didn’t matter to him – he drank in every bit of her greedily, chasing the feeling of companionship with almost reverent desperation.
He longed to be nearer to her, craved the presence of a human companion with an intensity that he hadn’t felt for a long time now. But he didn’t dare disturb the tremulous calm that only seemed to settle around her after dusk. It would feel like a violation, like smearing a clumsy line across a masterpiece.
***
The awful, gaping mouth of a monstrous pitcher gazed at them from up high, leering at them as it blocked their path. He didn’t know how long they had been travelling together or how many times they’d encountered a similar sight – it was jarring all the same. The blood of some wretched creature dotted the plant’s blank face, and slid slowly down its smooth skin. Everything was so still that he could hear its soft, wet breathing.
Out of the corner of his eye, he felt her twitch and braced himself. Being familiar with her swift movements and ruthless nature, he watched as she hurled her axe with deadly aim right into the plant’s fleshy throat. It thrashed in silent horror, sap running down its neck in rivulets. A slow death, an agonising one. She smiled in grim satisfaction.
The first few times, the speed at which she reacted to their environment had made his breath catch, heart thump wildly with fear. Now, as she climbed up the dying plant’s body with practised ease to retrieve her weapon, he felt only old affection, almost that of a friend’s.
***
“I’m trying to build something,” he offered one night, never taking his eyes off the expanse of constellations above him. The confession burned, made his teeth chatter. Directly overhead was Canis Major, the brightest star in the sky. He stared at it so hard that it seared itself into his vision.
Silence. He thought she was going to ignore the words, but finally, she spoke, her voice less harsh than it usually was. Or perhaps that was wishful thinking. Everything about her shifted and blurred in his mind.
“Build something,” she echoed, “Why?”
She didn’t ask what, for which he was grateful, but why.
“Because I want something to last,” he replied carefully, and let the rest remain unsaid. Because nothing else did.
“Nothing lasts,” she said, and the old fury was in her voice again. When he dared glance at her, he saw it sitting in the lines of her neck, arms, back. A bristling demon crouched on her shoulders. Her old friend, his worst enemy.
***
The next morning, they discovered a lake.
“I had no idea this was so close by,” he said in wonder, drinking in the magnificent expanse before him. On the distant, hazy shoreline across them, he could see the familiar outlines of the massive pitcher plants stirring.
“It isn’t close by. Not to where you’re thinking of,” she said, following his gaze. Her lip curled as she looked upon the pitchers.
“We’ve travelled a great distance since we – since I saw you first.”
Had they? He hadn’t even noticed, so wrapped up had he been in this new companion, this fire in his life. He watched her as she continued to speak, hardly listening to her words. A living, breathing miracle. He had been alone, so very alone…
“There are fish,” she said suddenly and grabbed his wrist in excitement. His entire arm burned at the touch. “Fish! We don’t have to eat only roots and berries anymore!” She laughed out loud, clear like the water stretching out before them.
Her sudden, childlike joy washed over him like a golden tide and he laughed too, unable to help himself. She was already hacking at vines and roots.
“It’s a net,” she explained when she caught sight of his confused expression. He was always ten steps behind. Always happy to follow her, wherever she went.
The joy didn’t last. It never did – and she soon slipped away like she always did. But the memory of her real laughter carried him through the day. For the first time, he knew without a doubt that she would come back that night.
***
“I don’t want to build anything,” she said, days later. He scarcely breathed for fear of frightening away whatever this was. The lake before them lay placid in the afternoon sunlight.
“I want to – I want to destroy everything, all of this!” she was glaring fiercely ahead, nets forgotten at her feet. Furious tears glittered in her eyes and she turned to him with her head tilted high like a challenge, like she was daring him to deny her this rage. Like he wouldn’t give anything and everything he had to her, if only she asked.
“I’m so angry. So angry.”
“I know,” he said quietly. When he looked back at her, the anger was gone, for the first time since he’d seen her. The new lightness of her features took his breath away.
“Okay,” she said, and then, “Will you help me with the nets or do you want to starve before nightfall?”
***
Neither of them had said it out loud, but they’d decided to stay in their clearing by the lakeside, at least for a while. They’d spent a day methodically killing the plants around the clearing they’d chosen and with their carcasses, strung up a canopy. It felt like more than it was. Like they were rooting themselves somewhere, though he would never have said it aloud.
“You’re clever with your hands,” she told him, watching him weave the stems in and out, in and out. He looked up at her, surprised. She hadn’t ever said anything like that before.
“Thank you,” he said cautiously, and then before he could stop himself, added, “I want to show you something.”
He held his breath, waiting for a swift and cutting reply, but she tilted her head, considering it.
“Alright,” she said.
They trekked through the dark tangle of foliage in silence, him wondering at how easily she followed him – almost as though she trusted him. When she automatically turned off towards the lake, he put out a hand to stop her. She looked at his arm on hers for a long moment before stepping backward.
“Not there,” he said, barely whispering although there was nobody else to hear them, “It’s further in here, this way.”
When they emerged onto the edge of a clear, moonlit forest pool, he heard her breathe in sharply. The glassy surface reflected delicate phosphorescent orbs of light, each catching each other midway until the whole pool seemed to glow from its very core.
“How…” she whispered in awe, and as she moved the light from the pool caught all her sharp edges and softened them before his very eyes. She looked like a creature of the forest, wild and beautiful and untouchable.
“Did you know,” he said quietly, kneeling at the pool’s edge, “The young plants emit light. I think it fades by adulthood.”
He followed her gaze as she took in the hundreds of young sundews at their feet, at the pool’s edge, all glittering and waving in the cool night. He hadn’t ever shown them to her before, this little piece of calm beauty he could call his own.
“Bioluminescence,” she murmured before she came back to herself. The warring wonder and fury in her eyes were captivating.
“They don’t become dangerous until later,” he said softly, running his hands along the soft, sticky plants. They seemed to croon, lean into the touch.
“Now they just want to be friends.”
“They don’t,” she said, but there was nothing jagged in her voice, only something old and sad, “They’ll grow up and all be the same. You’ll see.”
She turned to leave but he didn’t miss the way she let her gaze linger upon the dancing, moving lights for just a moment more before she disappeared into the shadows.
She didn’t bring it up when he returned, not that night or any of the days following, but sometimes he felt her watching him in a new light, like he was a particularly strange puzzle she was trying to work out.
***
“You still haven’t told me your name,” she said one evening as they were returning to their campsite. It had been one of those rare days where she’d offered him her presence long after the sun was out. They happened more and more lately. She’d watched him with her bright, clever eyes and it had made his skin tingle and his chest heat up.
“I don’t have one,” he said and his heartbeat quickened with the sick unease in his throat. It was true. He was nobody and had nobody. No name. No home. Nothing.
“You don’t have a name?” she demanded, incredulous.
“I don’t need one,” he said quietly.
“But what about before? You must have had a name before,” she pressed on, like a thorn twisting into his foot. It stung.
“It doesn’t matter,” he retorted, dusty sharpness stirring in his gut, “There is no before, this is what we have now.”
“You’re a coward,” she said coldly.
He stopped short, the unexpected hurt so strong that he couldn’t breathe for a moment.
“You’re a coward and you know it,” she continued, and her cruelty was captivating – he couldn’t help but hang onto every word.
“You pretend like you didn’t have a life before all of this. You never speak of it, you live like this is the same place it was when we were born and like you didn’t have a family and friends and people you loved. You hide behind your stupid ideas of building something, when all you’re really building is this dream world where you pretend like nothing ever happened-”
“Stop it,” he said softly. She was taking her axe to his walls and with each strike he shrivelled in on himself more and more and more. But she wouldn’t stop. Wasn’t that what had so captivated him about her? Her relentlessness? Her cutting, unceasing determination?
“- and you won’t even admit you have a name! That you were a person! You don’t even call me by mine! What else does that make you, if not a coward?”
“Stop it!” he shouted, and the loudness of his voice rang in his ears, stunning even himself. She fell silent for a moment, gazing at him with mingled fury and satisfaction.
“I knew it,” she said, “I knew it had to be in you somewhere.”
He stared at her, chest heaving. His entire body was aflame with anger and humiliation and he could feel it in his teeth. He so despised her and he had never been more drawn to her. In that moment he could have done anything.
There was a loud crack and the both of them snapped their heads to look upwards. A monstrous flycatcher twisted with smug laziness, swallowed the rest of the limp mynah in its jaws.
He tried to look back at her, but could not. Something broken had come alive in him and was scrabbling at his ribs. Instead he strode on ahead, every particle of him trembling, exposed. Never before had he been so cleanly taken apart and she had done it with such ease, laying him and his organs bare for her and the sunlight to pour into.
He stood still under their canopy, panting heavily like he’d run for miles. And then with a sudden savagery he did not know he possessed, he ripped apart the dead, dying vines and leaves with his bare hands. The skin on his palms split from the teeth, unforgiving even in death. The gritty pain made him feel ecstatic, alive.
When she reached, she didn’t say a word about the destruction he’d wreaked, but her dark, knowing eyes took their time roving over the tatters of what he once could have called their home. Finally, she looked directly at him and his breath caught in anticipation.
“Everybody needs a name,” she said, and began to rebuild.
***
That night, she sang. It was a lingering mournful thing, and she didn’t look at him. She looked instead at the sky just as he had when he’d first opened his soul to her. I’m trying to build something. He’d never stopped baring himself to her, apparently.
Her song was a peace offering, he knew, and he wanted to reject it, but the sharp, sweet surprise of hearing music in the air, her music, compelled him to get up, to sit next to her like he’d never dared to before. He hadn’t ever heard her voice like this, open and almost carefree, so different from the angry clench of teeth that punctuated her speech.
Her eyes were closed in the kind of vulnerability she hadn’t before shown him, and the sweet notes filtered through the stars and settled on him like summer rain. He drank her in like a man dying of thirst. When she opened her eyes, he saw her. She was trapped behind her own eyes– some wild, desperately sad creature that spoke to him through song and gaze.
This is the only way, she seemed to wordlessly plead, this is all I have. This is all I can offer you.
There was something so terribly lovely and achingly sad about her and, all at once, he couldn’t bear to look at her. He couldn’t bear to be around her.
He got up quietly, crept back to his shadows and pretended like he couldn’t feel her gaze burning into him through the night.
***
For days afterwards he watched her in silence, retreating into himself until everything blurred except for her. Her every movement, every word. In the long hours of day when she wasn’t there, he could think of nothing and nobody else. They didn’t speak, not really, but she still sang. They were, he came to understand, ones she created herself. For him. The realisation burned sweetly down his throat.
One pearly evening, he sat by the lake, letting the still-warm water lap around his ankles. He knew she was around – he always knew when she was around – but he couldn’t see her, only hear the quiet rustle of her movements.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” she said out loud into the darkness, and he startled at the way her voice wavered, “This is the only way I know how to tell it.”
He turned to meet her gaze for the first time in days and was surprised to see her eyes shining with tears. He felt them prick the back of his eyelids too but he didn’t look away, not this time.
He wasn’t surprised when she began to sing– the sound was so familiar now that he could hardly imagine a time when she hadn’t been singing. He was so grateful for something so painfully human.
This was the ballad of a young girl who wanted everything. She fought and scavenged until she found it, too, and she was so happy, so delirious in her success. Then came tragedy– her sister, her fiercest companion’s death, and with it, the girl’s strength perished. She wavered, crumbled, collapsed. She lived months and months in darkness but by and by, she allowed the light to come in. Allowed her family to find her and her home to flourish once more. She found a lover and a dog. She was older now, sadder now, but stronger than before. So when the blow came- the real blow, the lush green end, it swept the world away from beneath her. She was in freefall. Always falling. Nothing to anchor her but her temple of rage, whose altar she knelt at every day.
She stopped there and looked at him with a mingled look of fear and defiance.
“I don’t know what happens next,” she said like a confession and he couldn’t help the tears slipping down his face when he replied.
“She finds a friend,” he said carefully, “And they travel the new world together.”
“He is no friend,” she said with sudden fire, “If he refuses to show her who he really is. No true friendship can exist in imbalance. Not here and not like this.”
He could only look at her– he had no defence against her. He never would. This time, it was she who left, not him. In solitude, he thought of what she had said, all those evenings ago, that he was too much of a coward to speak even her name. The shame of it seared through him. Now, he tried it out tentatively. It sounded like a prayer on his lips. It added the last colours to her portrait.
***
“Can I come with you?” he asked her the next morning. She turned and stared at him.
“On your- wherever you go,” he clarified, because she wasn’t saying anything, and stifling silence was far worse than anything she could have said in response, “I’d like to come with you. If that’s alright. I’d like to come.”
“You know what I do,” she said slowly, and both of them looked down at the faithful axe in her grip that always followed her. He felt the bizarre urge to compete with it. Where you follow, I can too.
“I do,” he said, and it was true. The steady destruction of everything that had destroyed her. Butchering the plants, her sole mission, her only desire left in the world.
“And this doesn’t disagree with your building?” she asked, and he didn’t rise to the bait, not this time.
“No,” he said calmly, “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m building yet.”
She raised an eyebrow– of course, she knew this. But…
“When I was a child,” he began, and swallowed down the wild creature in him that protested and clawed all the more fiercely, “When I was a child, I loved to do things with my hands. I’d play with mud in the garden and make shapes. Only, I couldn’t ever figure out what I wanted to create, so I’d squish them halfway through and start again.”
She was staring at him with undisguised incredulity. His confession lay between them like a wounded creature. Her first real glimpse into his past life– or no, his present one.
“So I suppose building and destroying aren’t too far apart, really,” he said with a nonchalance that he clung to despite the frenzied thrashing inside him.
She swallowed, loosened her grip on the axe. Her eyes were softer now, and she looked at him for a few long moments.
“Alright,” she said, and the relief flooded through him, warming him to his very core, “You can come.”
***
Something had shifted between them, the way winter broke into spring. She was still angry, but not with him, he realised, and he accepted this like the blessing it was. One lakeside morning, he said something to make her smile, and when she looked at him, he knew.
This wasn’t a scream or a rock or the sharp sting of cutting words. The realisation, when it came, felt like coming home.
***
He didn’t say anything; could not bear the idea of shattering their new friendship, but it followed him everywhere he went, the way his cat used to follow him around the apartment after a long day at work. He held the secret close, nursed it till it grew and glowed in him, like a lantern that could not be put out.
He did wonder at the futility of it all. The world half-consumed, nearly everything dead or destroyed, and his love- for that was what it was- tearing through the haze he had so carefully shrouded himself in. Love that would never be returned in the way he so desired, he knew, but still love nonetheless.
And in between the days that slipped by like drops of water, he began to unravel the tangled nest of the creature that lived inside him, coaxing it out, taming it. He spoke about his life and ignored the flashing pain it brought him. She listened with patience, even when he stumbled or simply gave up. And he chased the creature away– not with anger, but with patience and when it abandoned its nest on his ribs, he destroyed that too.
One evening, he asked her to sing again and she laid down her axe, looking at him with surprise.
“I didn’t think you wanted to hear me,” she said with a half-smile, “After the last time.”
I always want to hear you, he thought with sudden wild longing. I always want to be around you, I want to be one with you. I would do anything for you, don’t you understand, anything, anything.
And he didn’t say it, but she saw it, and he saw that she understood from the flash of knowing in her eyes. He wasn’t afraid– he knew she wouldn’t leave, not after all this time. He wasn’t afraid but he let himself briefly mourn what they had shared and what would inevitably be tainted now.
She didn’t say anything. She closed her eyes and she sang– not the same song as the previous time, but something else. Something rosier, something with hope. And as the music swelled and crescendoed around them, it seemed to cast her in a brilliant light. Light that reached over and touched him when she did, when she took her hand in his and his lips against hers. He was painted into her picture and the strokes of it breathed life into him.
Afterwards it was so simple to look her in the eye and say, thank you, I love you, to finally hold her name in his mouth like a precious thing, to allow himself to taste it. To lean over and whisper his own into her ear.
_________________________
Gayatri is a recent B.A. English graduate, and is currently teaching (English) at Parikrma Centre for Learning in Bangalore. She is and always has been a lover of all literature that iis fantastical and whimsical. She is an aspiring children’s writer and illustrator.
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Feature image by Annie Spratt via Unsplash
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