the station at the end of the world
BY CLIFF MUSIAL
I wasn’t very old when my aunt dropped me off at the station at the end of the world.
Perhaps old enough to travel on my own, but certainly not old enough to travel past the end of the world.
Nor was I old enough to be scared or sad about leaving. I wouldn’t miss my aunt and uncle, or their fourteen acres in the forest, but I did feel sad about leaving the cat without a name. We just called him the cat, and let him stay in the house or the barn as long as he killed mice. The cat had showed up to my aunt and uncle’s one day just like I had: hurt, alone, scared, tired, and hungry. At first, he kept to himself and slept in the barn, but soon he began to sleep in bed with me. It might have been because my room was warmer than the barn, but I always liked to think it was because we both knew what it was like. I would miss the cat.
The station at the end of the world stood on top of a hill, so looking back I could see the miles of smoking fires, razed fields, and ruined cities behind me up to the mountains that scraped the black clouds, and looking ahead I could see the flat mist stretching out ahead past the end of the world. The old station building leaned over the platform, made from carved stone and planks rather than bricks and cement like new buildings. Between it and the tracks, a few people waited on a thin platform. I watched my aunt’s old sedan pull out of the empty, crumbling lot littered with garbage and ash, then climbed the stairs that led up to the platform. In her half-hearted way of comforting me, my aunt had said I wouldn’t be the youngest there, and she was right. The first person I saw seemed younger than me. When I stepped over the last cement stair onto the platform, one hand in my coat pocket and the other clutching my suitcase tightly, the large boy sat on a bench facing the rails. I nodded to him, but he stared back looking both mean and scared. But I don’t think he was scared of me. In fact, he was bigger than me. He was probably just scared of the end of the world. I sat next to him, and we said nothing.
A short, nimble man skipped up to the bench. He wore a crumpled suit and tie and a bowler hat, like they used to wear in those old black and white movies my dad and I would watch on TV late at night before he left for the mountains to fight in the war.
“Here you go, little man,” he said in a chipper voice, and handed the boy a candy bar. My mouth watered. I hadn’t eaten one since I started living with my aunt and uncle.
“Oh, and hello, young lady,” he said, noticing me, and tipping his hat to show stripes of gray in his slick, black hair. “When did you get here? You see, I had just popped into the station to get this little man here a candy bar from-”
“Don’t call me little man,” said the boy, unwrapping his candy bar. “I’m bigger than you.”
“You certainly are, you certainly are,” said the man. I hadn’t noticed just how short the man was. “But even if you’re not little, you are young, so I can’t call you a big man. The alternative would be to call you big boy. That doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, does it?”
The boy shrugged. He bit into the candy bar pleasurably.
“You see, if I had to choose between being little or big, I would probably choose being big like you, though I don’t mind too much being little. But between being a man and a boy… I’d always rather be a man. Wouldn’t you rather think of yourself as a small man than a large boy? I think everyone would rather be a man than a boy. That’s maturity of the mind. Which, from my experience, is far more important than maturity of the body. I’ve gotten quite far in my life being a man that never grew large, but if I’d grown large and never become a man, well, I don’t think I’d have come as far. I am, however, stuck with nowhere to go but the end of the world, so I don’t know how much I can say for how far I’ve come in life.”
He laughed a high, clear laugh. “No, indeed. All roads lead to the end of the world, don’t you think, miss?”
I nodded but realized he was addressing a young woman leaning against a pillar not too far away, listening to him. She wore long baggy shorts, flip flops, a hoodie, and a backwards hat like they did in the city. Her hair was short, and piercings lined each ear. She looked off over the tracks toward where a particularly large fire swelled up and licked the dark, billowy sky.
“Uh-huh. But would you be saying that if you were standing anywhere but here? If you were anyone, or anything, but you?” She walked over to us, hands in her pockets. “It’s easy for us to say that all roads lead here now that we’re the ones standing here, waiting to leave and never come back. Nobody says that until they have to.”
“You’re quite right,” chuckled the man. “Quite right indeed. I’ve spent a lot of my life pretending I’d never have to come here. But it had to happen eventually, and here we are! Eating our last candy bars, seeing the people of this world for the last time. We only have each other, for now. Until we make it to wherever we’re going.”
“You really think we’re going anywhere?” asked the woman.
He rubbed his hands together and looked at me and the boy. He clearly hadn’t wanted us to think about this, though I already had, and it didn’t bother me, and the boy didn’t seem to think about much else besides the candy bar.
“Well, it’s certainly possible there’s nothing out there. We have no way of knowing.”
“I think there’s something,” I said quietly.
The woman lowered her eyebrows, intent, looking me over. The man asked, “Really? What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My aunt told me that it’s beautiful out there. I don’t believe her, though. I just don’t think there’s nothing, because there’s really no such thing as nothing.”
“Well stated, miss! You must be older than you look. What’s your name, by the way? That goes to all of you.” He beckoned to the woman and the boy with his hat. “My name is Millimas. Millimas Troy.”
“My name is Jon Trunder-North!” declared the boy suddenly. The candy bar was gone, and he tossed the wrapper onto the tracks. The wind yanked it up and away, down the hill and towards a muddy, barren field, where it settled down among the rest of the burnt debris and trash.
“I’m Lasil,” I said.
Millimas looked to the woman. “And you?”
“Georgia Vartol.”
“Vartol? That’s an odd name. Are you from past the mountains?” Millimas asked.
“Nah, but my dad was. I was born in the city.”
“Well, Jon, Lasil, and Georgia, it seems we’re all we’ve got for now, and perhaps for... a very long time.”
“There’s someone else,” said Georgia. She pointed down the platform toward the end of the world. On the last bench sat a figure in a black robe, which looked even blacker against the light gray of the endless mist behind him. Millimas’s face paled.
“What is one of those doing here?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ve been wanting to find out. Want to go and talk to it with me?”
“Not a chance!” said Millimas. “We should consider ourselves quite lucky that it’s staying over there by itself. Why risk our luck? Leave it alone.”
“It won’t hurt us. It’s going to the same place we are. It has no reason to hurt us, and we have no reason to be afraid.”
“My dad told me to never talk to people in black robes,” said Jon.
“And he’s right,” said Millimas.
“What about you, Lasil?” Georgia asked me. “Want to come talk to it?”
-
Once they couldn’t stop the fires anymore, my mom and I had to leave town. One of the big ones was spreading toward our town, and they told us everyone had to leave. Dad had left for the war months before, so Mom and I put as much as we could into the car and drove east to where my aunt and uncle lived. I was too young to understand, and I couldn’t stop crying because Mom made me leave my stuffed animals behind, but she let me bring Dad’s old music player. I would come to cherish it far more than any of my toys, although I didn’t know that then, of course. Listening to Dad’s old songs with the cat curled up beside me in my bedroom at my aunt and uncle’s would get me through the years of sleepless nights when the heavy rain sounded like it would cave in the roof, the booms from the war shook the earth, and the fires made the sky as bright as day.
I remember Mom saying we were almost halfway there when the people in black robes appeared in the road. Mom yelped. I was so scared I stopped crying.
“It’s okay, Lasil, it’s okay honey,” she told me, pulling the car to the side of the road.
“It’ll be alright.” They walked slowly to her side of the car, and she rolled down the window.
“Where are you going?” one of them asked.
“To the station at the end of the world. We’re leaving,” Mom said.
“I thought we were going to Aunt Paola’s!” I whined.
“It’s okay honey, we’re stopping there on the way.” She patted my hair. The person in the black robe leaned toward the window. I could see a shadow of a face beneath the hood.
“Why do you need all of these things to go to the end of the world?” it said, pointing to our belongings.
“I’m dropping them off at my sister’s on the way,” Mom said shakily.
“And why does your sister need them? Is she planning on staying?”
“Yes,” said Mom. “I… couldn’t convince her to leave.”
“Perhaps we can help you convince her, if you show us the way.”
“I don’t think so.”
The person in the black robe pulled open the car door.
“Wait!” Mom yelled. “I’ll come with, I’ll help you, I will! Just let her go! Let my daughter go!”
“You’re awfully concerned about her life for planning on going to the station at the end of the world.”
Mom turned to me and held my head up in her hands, her watery eyes locking with mine.
“Run,” she said, opening the passenger door and pushing me out.
And I ran.
-
“Okay,” I said to Georgia, standing up from the bench. I was taller than Millimas, whose eyes bulged at me.
“Atta girl,” said Georgia. “Come on.”
We walked slowly down the platform toward the end of the world while Georgia talked to me in a low voice.
“I would tell you there’s no need to be afraid, but I can see you’re not scared, are you?”
I shook my head.
“That man, Millimas, he’s the one you should be scared of. I might not look that old, but I lived on my own in the city for a while. I’ve met a lot of men like him, and they’re always dangerous, no matter where you are. The people in the robes, though, they can’t hurt you anymore. This is what they want us to do. Leave the world.”
“I like Millimas,” I said. “I think he’s okay.”
“Well, I guess he’s okay. Better than most of them, from what I can see. But that doesn’t mean you should trust him.”
“Why should I trust you, then?”
Georgia stopped and looked at me. “Because I know what it’s like. He doesn’t. They don’t.”
She was right. I nodded, and we walked up to the person in the black robe. My heart beat quickly even though I knew that we had nothing to be afraid of.
“Hello,” said Georgia. “Are you leaving too?”
It didn’t look at us, and stayed silent for a moment before speaking.
“Yes,” it said. Its voice was hollow and wispy.
“You know, I agree with you in a way. I chose to come here.”
Georgia surprised me when she said that. I thought no one chose to go there. I’d always been sure that Mom lied when she told them we were heading for the station at the end of the world.
“Why?” it breathed, asking the question I was thinking.
“Because I agree with you. We all need to leave. It’s time.”
“Well, you don’t agree with me.” Georgia and I flinched as it pulled down its hood. Its head was bald and impossibly pale. I was surprised to see it had a normal face, though a bit shriveled and scarred. A man’s face.
“I was wrong. They’re wrong. If everyone left, there would be nothing left here. And there must be something here, or this would all be for nothing. I thought that we were saving the world, but now I can see that all we did was speed up its destruction.”
He paused for a moment, watching the smoke and fire.
“I was reborn in the fire. I am what I am, I’ve done what I’ve done, and I can’t change that, but I can leave. It’s all that’s left for me. But I was wrong. We were wrong.”
“Wrong that everyone needs to leave?”
He finally looked at us. I can’t remember what color his eyes were, but they glared with such an intensity it was hard to watch.
“More than that. Wrong about it all. I was a man once, and perhaps I still am, even though I tried to give it up to the flames. There is evil in men and women—great evil—but greater still is the evil that destroys them. The people in black robes are no better than the fire. I just hope someone will stop them, and perhaps even save something. Something that will carry on if the fires and the wars ever end. But it won’t be me.”
Georgia swallowed and looked back and forth between the world and the end of the world. I think she wondered whether that someone could be her.
“Do you think there’s something out there?” she asked.
“There’s always something,” he said.
He turned his head towards the end of the world. I followed his gaze. Past the edge, mist swirled gently in all directions forever. The sky was clear, the sun and the stars nowhere to be seen. No fire, no rain, no light, no dark. I felt something like hope for the first time since I left home.