The Song, It’s Singers, and the End of the World

by Spencer Nitkey

Originally published in Fusion Fragment, Issue #16, April 2023

Night sings through the clouds with a crescent smile and an alto yellow moon. I am alive, which means my skin is in rhythm with the air, which is in rhythm with the sand, which is in rhythm with the sea, which is in rhythm with the stars, which are in rhythm with my skin.

I am speaking and almost all of me is in these words. The distance between my gray lipid sparks and my language is infinitesimal, close enough to close with a question, or a kiss. That’s how I know I am with friends.

And what does it matter that the world is ending come morning? That Jonathan will leave for the far side of the galaxy, where he’ll be as senseless as violence. Where he’ll be violence. We close our eyes and imagine the dropping of bombs and the silence of space and the dying everywhere on a planet so far from here no one will understand anything he says through his teenage earthen accent. He’s only just turned 18.

Sophia is cartwheeling on the sand. Each limb is a perfect straight line out from her torso and she tumbles, head over feet over head again, backdropped by the moon-swept waves. She’ll stay, despite the ending. Because she wants to die on the rock she was born on. Because she’s too stubborn to be talked out of it. Because her parents can’t afford an escape pod and she doesn’t want to kill. She’ll probably laugh into the air turned flame and outshine it, knowing her.

Breeze will be digital, dissolved into that zen ocean of  binary. He’ll  be a koan, soon. “How can you live forever? By dying.” He’ll be handsome in code. He’ll tendril as wide as the web lets him. He’s like a gas, Breeze, always expanding to the edges of his container. His container here is small, and it won’t be much longer. But, he won’t have callouses on his hands. He won’t have hands at all. Nothing of him will patina across your skin as he holds you. Nothing will mark his touch and leave small red streaks of confusion and warmth across your stomach when he wraps his arms around you from behind. Because the world is ending.

Almani is crying and leaning on Breeze’s shoulder. She is going wherever her parents take her in the wide universe. Tears run in contiguous rivers down her cheeks. Her swimmer’s, stoner’s, and singer’s lungs are strong, and her sobs come out in perfect pitches I’m certain you could play on a piano. I’m glad she’s here, sharing her sadness. We are each a nerve open to the raw air, and she reminds us of this.

Tomorrow, I am wilding, I’ve decided. I can’t bring myself to tell them. This is the only gap between my words and me. It is not a small distance. It is a chasm.

#

When the wilds came melting through the air, most people thought they’d gone crazy. The sky went sepia and crimson. Everything warbled like vibrato, or a vanishing mirage. Sight smeared like rained-on  watercolor. Then we discovered everyone else was seeing it, too. We’d all gone crazy.

No one knew what the wilds was until it sunk its voices into the earth. Great columns of sound, skyscraper-wide, bored into the ground. Whirlpools of dirt and stone upended schools and gardens and row homes and tidepools. No one died. It was like the wilds knew where we were, or where we weren’t.

The vibrations hummed and dug and sang and dug and symphonied and dug. Eventually, the curious, the teenagers who knew they’ d never die, crept close to the columns of sound and listened and watched as stone and soil and clay danced up into the air buoyed by the noise in great singing swirls, like whirpools in reverse, like nothing we’ d ever seen before.

#

Sophia’s toes are touching the ocean and she’s still. She’s so rarely still, I hold my breath watching her. The Atlantic is freezing in February and all our lips are blue, but what does it matter, with the world ending.

“I—” do not finish my sentence, though everyone looks at me when I start.

In the pause, they turn from me, avert their eyes and show their ears, and now it is my turn to cry. I did not ever think I would find people who knew me this well, and now that I have, the world is ending.

Freed from gaze, but certain they were listening I try again. My breath catches on the hiccuped tears.

“What do you think it’s like?” I ask, instead.

Jonathan smiles, and I wonder if he knows. Almani reaches out and touches my cheek and looks me in the eyes. Breeze sits perfectly still in his beach chair, practicing for a life without a body.

“I have no fucking idea,” Sophia says. She stomps her feet in the shallow, lapping waves, and shivers.

“I don’t care what they’re like,” she says. “I hate them.”

“It,” I correct, because I have to. “It’s just one thing, the wilds.”

Sophia rolls her eyes. I wince and she looks apologetically down then flips. The water kicked up from her feet arches in thin parabolas as she turns through the air and lands with a splash. Her face calms when she finishes.

“Why does it matter?” she asks.

Because I will join it soon.

“I don’t know, but I think it does,” I say, the chasm wide.

#

We slogged through the humid summer as the wilds’ howls cut away our planet. Jonathan and Almani brought beach chairs, tents, and SPAM to the edge of the closest hole to our hometown and set  up  camp. Sophia and I drove down together. Breeze hitch-hiked his way down from Maine. We stared into it, close to its humming edge and let the song overtake us.

The summer is awful for me. The air clings like styrofoam to my skin. I sweat and pant. I am not calm or sunny in summer. Yet, sitting, watching the wilds pull away the earth in a perfect circle, hearing my friends laugh and beer glass lids clink lightly against teeth, I did not mind the air or the heat, and I was happy.

#

We all stand and join Sophia in the ocean. Almani looks at me with her head cocked to the side. Jonathan is considering whether to tackle Sophia into the ocean, his whole body tensing, then relaxing, then tensing as he changes his mind.

Breeze lifts his arms to the side and the wind catches his unbuttoned flannel, billowing it like a kite around his torso, and I want to wrap my arms around him and ground him, for just a moment, but I’m too lost in my own thoughts to move.

The cold waves dance on my toes as I sink to my ankles in the sand beneath them.

“I am—” and no one turns but I feel them listening. “I am—” I repeat. “Really glad to be here with you.”

We should feel guilty, being here and not with our familes, but none of us do. This is what we want. We should feel small, but we don’t. I should tell them the truth because I want to tell them the truth. I try.

 “I’m wilding,” I say. “I decided.”

The waves crash three times before anyone responds.

#

We camped at the wilds’ precipice for a week and half before we saw our first wilding. Two old women, holding hands and walking carefully over the uneven ground, ambled to the very edge of the singing. They did not stop to look at each other. They just squeezed each other’s hands. The muscles and bones in their forearms made a ripple under their skin. They sang in gentle whispers, like a lullaby you’ d sing to an already sleeping infant, and stepped over the edge.

Almani stood to rescue them, but Jonathan held her back.

They did not fall. They floated. The texture of the wilds’ singing changed and harmonized with the two soft voices, like a choir rising up behind a soloist. The women’s bodies shifted, as if viewed from beneath a rippling surface of water, and atom by  atom they dissolved, dandelion wisps in a breeze, into the shimmer of sound, until they were nothing but song.

Jonathan and Sophia cursed. Almani sat back in her chair and did not speak for hours. Breeze took my hand in his, with eyes as wide as the wilds’ holes and my heart beat against my shirt.

I tried, desperately, to figure out what I was feeling, and much, much later, I realized it was longing.

#

“Because it seems impossibly nice,” I say. “Because everything we know is ending forever, and I’m ready to be something new.”

Almani smiles. She understands. Sophia walks to her chair and sits for the first time in hours. Jonathan walks up and stands very close to me.

“No one knows what it does, if you even really continue living,” he says.

“I know,” I answer, and I do. “That’s okay.”

Jonathan tilts his head to the side and studies my face for a long time.

“Jupiter,” he says. “Who would have ever thought you’ d be the one of all of us most comfortable with ambiguity.”

I laugh. Almani laughs. Even Sophia, through her scowl, chuckles.

Breeze is silent.

“Don’t you hate them?” Sophia asks as the titters ebb.

“No,” I answer. I feel my steps, unsteady across the chasm’s bridge. 

“They’re ending the world,” she says.

“Our world,” I say.

#

The wilds was a sound based hivemind. I read articles to my friends as we drove back from the edge, sweaty and tired and happy. Harmonic complications formed near dying stars tangled with thought patterns and undulations in spacetime and—

“—who cares. What do they want?” Sophia interrupted.

“It,” I corrected, then paused for a long time until everyone got very worried. “They say...They say their song is going to destroy the world.”

#

Breeze walks away from us, down the shoreline. I look back at Jonathan and Sophia and they both nod for me to follow him.

I don’t hurry. I walk with long strides until my natural pace brings me to his side, far, now, from the others.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

The waves foam as the breeze picks up. My skin raises in a thousand small bumps against the cold, then a thousand more when the heat of Breeze’s skin meets mine in a sudden, turning brush.

“Is this because of me?” he asks. “Cause I’m leaving you?”

He looks worried. Wide eyes and furled brows and his thumbs rubbing against his index fingers.

Oh. There’s another chasm. The one between the you you think you are, and the you you actually are.

#

After our trip, I dropped everyone but Breeze off at their home and drove in a lazy circle around the neighborhood with Breeze in the passenger seat.

“Holy shit,” he said.

“The end of everything,” I said.

For a long time we were both too awed and terrified to think. Of course the end of the planet no longer meant the end of its people. There were interstellar colonies and the web and it would be okay. But it also wouldn’t. Everything was changing.

“Should we stop kissing?” he asked.

“Why?” I said, embarrassingly more afraid now than I had been when I learned the world was ending.

“So it won’t hurt so badly when we can’t anymore,” he said. “So we won’t have a million more goodbyes to say.”

I parked the car in the shade of a chestnut tree. Light swam through the interstices of leaves and cast long, checkered shadows on Breeze’s face through the moon roof.

“Why does it have to be goodbye?” I said.

I must have asked desperately, because pity flashed in Breeze’s eyes before his tender stare, the kind that could melt ice cream in a freezer, replaced it.

“It’s too big a universe to think, to hope, I guess, that we’ d end up in the same place, however it ends,” he said.

“We could try,” I said.

“And make it hurt more when we fail? I want to be your friend. I...I can’t lose everything and you at the same time.”

It felt like that was exactly what was happening anyways. “Are we breaking up?” I said.

“I think so, Jupiter. I’m sorry.”

We drove home in silence. I crawled into bed quietly. Neither of my parents were home from work yet. I cried and cried until I realized he was right. I didn’t want him to be, probably because I wanted him. But he was.

#

“No,” I say. “It’s not because of you.” As I say it, I am certain it’s true. This answer amplifies the worry on his face.

“Then why?” he asks. “Just because the world’s ending doesn’t mean you have to...I know Sophia, but she’s...I mean it’s not a choice for her. Why lose yourself like this?”

The moon slips behind a thicket of clouds and everything shadows. Breeze vanishes into the dark as my eyes adjust. I hear the ocean and somewhere, between the crashing waves, I hear the far away song of the wilds. The night lays on me, peaceful, like a blanket. In the dark my thoughts crystalize, like freezing water, until I can hold one on my tongue. I go to open my mouth and it melts, spilling down the sides of my mouth, incoherent. I  et  the chill settle longer. I try again.

“Before I met you, and Jon and Sophia and Almani, I thought the world was incoherent. Everything was held up by strings I couldn’t see, controlled by fingers and rules I couldn’t begin to understand. It was all white noise. Then Cadrium’s class happened and you all, we all. It all began to make more sense. When I’m with you guys, all of you, Breeze, not just you, there’s a rhythm and sense to all the noise. It becomes music. Even if I don’t always understand it, I can sway along, and it’s beautiful.”

“And wilding?”

“It’s a new kind of music. I don’t know its rules yet, but it’s harmonics and sound and I think I could make sense of it  all. Everything’s going to change. Everything’s ending. I’m choosing the one that makes the most sense. If I’m wrong and it’s death? Then I’m just like Sophia. If it’s violence and destruction? Then I’m just like Jonathan. But if it really is  a  new  way  of living, then maybe I’m like you. Living as a sound is the most wonderful thing I can imagine, second to being friends with all of you.”

“Oh,” Breeze says, and nothing else. The moon escapes its straightjacket of storm. Breeze’s eyes reflect the new light in two opalescent spheres. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

And he kisses me.

And I am alive. Which means my lips are in rhythm with Breeze, who is in rhythm with the moon, which is in rhythm with the storm far away over the ocean, which is in rhythm with the wilds, which are in rhythm with my lips.

I don’t care that it will end in the morning. It is good and resonant and singing right now.

#

The wilds’ songs, its columns of sound, would burrow and meet in the center of the earth. Its combined vibration would shake the earth, dissolve the atmosphere, and explode the planet on February 28th.

Everyone cried for a week, when the prediction came through, then went back to work and kids like us went back to school until one month, to the day, before the end of everything.

Jonathan and I hiked on the first day of true freedom, that kind that comes only when death is in view.

We were mostly silent. Our feet and legs trudged up the side of the mountain.

At the top of the mountain, we saw everything around us, 360 degrees, and we knew that in a month it would all be ash and flame, and despite that we smiled. At the edge of our view, we saw floating earth inside a singing column. Sweat moistened our brows and Jonathan let a loud yowl out that sent nearby birds fluttering into the sky.

He shrugged at me, embarrassed, but I turned out to the world and gave my own, loud yowl. Then another. It felt good. My voice carried and soared on the wind. I yelled again, then again, then again and again. I screamed and imagined that I, my thoughts and my mind, soared out from my body with the sound. I imagined floating, ephemeral on the wind. I sang. I was sound. I screamed, and if I could I would have floated and spread and dissipated at regular, even, controlled intervals with the sound. It would be sensible.

Soon we were both screaming. We yelled until our throats tore and we couldn’t talk anymore. Then we panted with our hands on our knees and ate our packed ham sandwiches in silence, smiles as wide as the wilds’ holes.

In that moment, I knew where I was going at the end of things. I just didn’t know how to tell anyone else that as long as everything was changing, I wanted to change too.

Lightning cracked from the overcast and rain poured. Jonathan and I raced down the mountain as thunder and lightning bit our heels. We shoved our phones into the empty sandwich bags to keep them dry from the rain, and slid on our butts down the steep rocks and gravel.

#

Breeze’s mouth and mine part slowly, like the tide going out.

He wraps his calloused hands around mine and I feel his rough touch like a fingerprint.

I look out to the ocean because he is, with all that moonlight on his face, far too beautiful to stare at directly. The ocean, bouncing the moon off  it like a yellow beachball, shimmering with ripples of gold, is not much better, so I close my eyes entirely.

“Let’s go make sense of it all before it ends,” Breeze says, nodding back towards our friends, and there is no longer a bridge because there is no longer a chasm. Is there a word for when someone else’s language coextends perfectly with the thoughts in your head?

Maybe it’s love.

Back by the chairs, Sophia is spotting Jonathan as he tries and fails to do a backflip. Almani is watching through her fingers.

I ask if Sophia can spot me next. She rubs her temple and asks if everyone wants to try. We all scream yes and the waves of our voices meet the waves of the ocean.

She laughs, breaking like the white foam crest of a wave, gives us a small demonstration, then starts with me.

She puts one arm across the small of my spine and the other on the back of my leg, behind my knee. I jump like she showed me, mostly up, in a straight line, arching slightly backwards, with my arms towards the sky. She pushes against the back of my knees with one arm as I pull them to my chest, hard, like I’m trying to put a hole through my heart and for a fraction of a second, I’m floating in the air.

Everything spins as I rotate, head backwards over my feet. In the blur, the world is upside down and smeared. It is hardly recognizable, in that instant, as a world, but it doesn’t matter. It makes perfect sense to me. Sophia’s arm is strong on my back as I spin. She and my rotation strain against gravity.

Everything, everything, everything makes sense.

The world is ending soon. I’m sad, because it has just started making sense to me.

The world is ending soon. I’m happy, because it has just started making sense to me.

I am spinning through the air and hoping to land, impossibly, on my feet.

 Tomorrow I will be sound.

It’s okay that the world is ending tomorrow because today I am with my friends, carving sense through the noise. It’s okay that it’s ending because it is wonderful. It’s okay.

My toes touch the sand.

Dawn sings across the horizon. I am alive.