"The End of the World" a short story by me

Happy Monday and happy Halloween everybody! 

This story doesn't really have to do with Halloween... but it's been awhile since I've posted a short story and I think this one is fun.  :)  I hope you like it.  

The End of the World

My clock stopped working. It was such a mundane, frustrating start to the day – a day that ended up being one of the strangest yet. I hit the clock a couple of times over the head but no rattling could snap it out of its stupor. It was a couple years old anyways, buying a new one wasn't the issue. What made me stop and late for work, was why? There seemed to be no logical reason for the clock to stop. It was plugged in, the extra emergency batteries were perfectly in place, and I knew the power hadn’t gone out because the time on the stove was ticking as normal. The clock was tired of ticking, I suppose that's the only answer though I can't be sure how logical, it's a lifeless object after all.  Being tired of ticking is a relatable sentiment to me these days, I’ve been living alone too long.  

I forgot about the clock entirely until lunch time. I sat in the break room, the smallest room of the office, a room with a vending machine and two small tables. “The smaller the room the smaller the break, take that to heart,” Boss Charleston boomed one monthly meeting. I was about to sit down, alone, at one of the two tables, the other was taken in by Jane and Ned, when what Jane had been explaining registered to me.  

  “Mind if I join you?” I sat down without waiting for an answer, feeling bolder than I ever have before.  

“Of course Luka!” Jane said, smiling bigger than I have ever seen her talking with Ned.   Though ‘Luka’ is not my name I decided not to mention it.  

“Lucas,” Ned monotones and looks over his mug at me. 

Bell, Jane's best friend, came in but the tables fit two and I watched in the reflection of the vending machine as she rolled her eyes at the back of my head.  

“I was just saying,” Jane continued, her voice rising to a squeaky shirek, “I woke up this morning at my usual time but with no thanks to my alarm clock, I found that it was broken this morning, though I’m still not sure how it broke.”  

“Close your mouth Lucas, you look like a codfish.” Ned commented, glaring. 

“I apologize, it’s just the same thing, I mean the exact same thing, happened to me this morning.”  I watched Jane’s face change from blank, to confused, to shocked.  Ned’s face never changed.  

“Surely not…” she hesitated, “Well what are the odds.  Ned?  What about you, did your clock coincidentally choose to break today too?” 

“Hmmn no, I don’t use an alarm clock.  Haven’t for years.  I wake up at the same time each day.”  

“Well, lucky you I guess,” she shrugged. 

“I’ve always been terrible at waking up on time,” I said, feeling as though I am adding absolutely nothing to the conversation and telling myself I’ll slink off the bathroom if the silence lasts too long.  I don’t have to worry much about silence with Jane. 

“Bell!” she yells to the next table, “did your alarm clock stop working this morning?” 

“Wait, what?” Bell hurried over, happy for an excuse to do so as Jane scoots over on her chair so they can both sit, half on and half off one chair.  I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it and stare blankly at the giggling, shifting girls with their sides stuck together.  I felt like I was watching a strange movie, looking through a little screen into the break room and not really there.  

“Yes!” Bell exclaimed, and that snapped me out of it.  

“What?” 

“Yes.  I mean yes, my alarm clock really did break this morning.”  

The problem of the alarm clocks was resolved soon enough, not the true problem but the problem of, coincidence or not?   Answer: not.  Jane found a news station on her phone, a crack down the middle of her screen cut the presentator’s face in two.  The report was basically an overview of the epidemic of mysteriously dead clocks and radios in most places around the world.  Jane propped her phone up for us all to watch the broken man rattle on as Bell periodically read posts from a subreddit detailing theories how the beginning of the end of the world had begun.    

The four of us were sitting on the curb outside of the office building, sipping sweet peach tea courtesy of Ned.  It felt like we were in grade school waiting for someone to pick us up after school, drinking juice and bored.  

“I think my pants are getting dirty.”  Jane shifts on the concrete.  

“Who cares, the world is ending isn’t it?” Ned smirks. 

“Stop it, I know you don’t believe that but you don’t need to joke about it.” She said,  whipping her head towards him.  

“No, I don’t believe it, do you?” 

“Not exactly,” she hesitated, “I don’t know what I think is going on.” 

“Me neither,” he agreed.  

“Does anybody have a different theory about what’s going on?”  Bell asked. She believed in the theories the most out of all of us and she seemed strangely resolved with the matter.  

“Not me.”  I added. It felt strange to be silent in a group like that, and as the day progressed I noticed too, talking in times I never normally would.  Most times I said things I deemed pointless but I said them anyway.  It felt right with that group. 

“Do you believe in them?” Bell hounded after me.  

“Yeah, I think so,”  I said with a smirk, another thing I would never normally say.  

“Are you being serious?” Her eyes narrowed. 

“Yeah.”  Why not?  

“So what does that mean?” Ned asked, “Are aliens coming, are they trying to communicate with us, is the world about to explode or something?” 

“I don’t know, I just think something this big and widespread must mean something, right?”  Trying to articulate honest thoughts on the spot was not easy.  “Maybe the worlds not ending but some version of it might be, things are changing.  I mean, you’ve seen the reports, all the fancy scientists who are supposed to know all about the earth are searching frantically and can't even seem to find a reason for all this.”  

They were silent for a moment.  

“Wow Lucas, that makes a lot of sense,” Bell said as if she was surprised and Jane and Ned both nodded.  I was part offended and part proud.  

We rose, throwing our empty tea bottles away one by one before all moving forward to walk around a patch of woods next door to the office building, a silent decision we all agreed with.  The work day hadn’t ended exactly but at lunch we all agreed that we wouldn’t be getting any more work done that day.  Bell would probably have the most luck with the boss asking if we could have off for the rest of the day.  She was good at acting, she had a friendly personality and a friendly figure and boss Charleston was a creep, I’ll leave it at that.  When she came back with the grin of victory plastered on her face, we knew he agreed. She hadn’t even stepped past the doorway of his office, his eyes were glued to his screen, the news station reflecting off his glasses.  He had looked at her for a silent awkward minute and then responded with a gruff yes.  She flashed him one last pleased smile and hurried away.  

A small path ran through the woods to a small clearing with two benches, a stone bird bath, and an unreadable plaque.  Moss ran up the legs of the benches and the bird bath and covered the mysterious plaque, a sign of age was written all over the small clearing.  It probably existed long before any of them, protected by some dedication or creed, sitting untouched right up to the very edge of the land as the office building was built.  

Two by two we each picked a bench, Ned and Jenny, Bell and I on the other one.  

With a strange sparkling, as the light filtered through the trees, the forest was changed.  It was peaceful in an otherworldly sense before the crash came.  There was nothing to do but sit, listening to the birds as the wind whistled and the leaves clapped along to their song.  

The warmth in the air seemed to go up a notch a minute, not warmth as in heat but as in the coloring of the world.  It all started to look very yellow.  

“Is anyone else seeing this?” I whispered.  I hadn’t moved for minutes, maybe talking normally would make it go away.  Once it didn’t I whipped my head about looking at my similarly unmoving, staring companions.  I leaped to my feet and nudged each one of them, startling them out of their stupor before circling around the benches, bending over to rub and sniff the leaves and scratch my palms against a tree’s bark.  

“Yeah…not just you,”  Jane said in the quietest voice I had ever heard her use, her reaction quite different from my loud explorations of the world, she squeezed her eyes tight, rubbing them tight and then opening them up large again.  

The world was being layered over and over with a warm yellow watercolor paint.  It couldn’t be rubbed off and besides the color the world was quite real and normal.  Though the world was orange now and even more distorted the darkening of the color seemed to stop.  It decided to stick with orange.  

“I guess the world is ending after all,”  Ned muttered, feeling the only proper reaction was an admission of guilt, “sorry for thinking you were being stupid with the idea.” Open eyes and under his breath, he started to pray.  

Bell was completely quiet but after I nudged her she rose up and seemed to float or dance around the circle.  She stopped next to the bird bath and a little bird, wings beating wildly, landed on her finger.  She raised her arm clear over head until the little creature flew away. 

“I think it’s quite— beautiful” was all she said in a scratchy, halting voice.  “But yes it must mean something, still how could a world like this end?” 

The previously mentioned crash came a moment later, sounding a little like metal scraping against metal, like a car crash, or a giant setting down the heaviest object imaginable but still consequently booming around the earth.  

Who will ever know how long we stood there, rattled and unable to move.  

“Let’s go see what made that noise,”  Jane said, startling our still ringing ears.  

We agreed and the expected back and forth of, ‘what in the world we’re not stupid, who would go towards the terrible sound,’ was nonexistent.  I think it had to do with our sense of survival having been flushed down the drain, at some level we all believed the world was ending and that we were going along with it. 

We stumbled through the brambles of the forest, each of us feeling like the change in the world made it hard to walk properly, it was all new and had to be re-learned.  Bell couldn’t seem to walk straight in any sense, her clothes kept catching on thorns and her feet on fallen trees.  Jane led the way, a determined, knowing to her step, though I am still not sure how she knew which direction she knew to go.  

She stopped but stumbled when Ned, who had been walking directly behind her, didn't.  I hadn’t been paying attention either, still looking at the world, but I immediately knew why she stopped.  

About ten yards in front of us sat a large box.  Not just any box, not a cardboard box, but a shiny metal box probably 5 foot square.  And the box sat inside a crater of indented and burned black earth.  

“That’s where the sound— “ Ned started when a small man came around the corner of the box.  He wore tight black overalls, had a short but thick beard, and was completely green.  

We stared at him, he stared at us.  His arms hung limply at his sides and he didn’t look scared at all, though I assume we did. He looked confident and dare I say… interested.  

I glanced at the people around me, at Jane, Ned, and Bell, their eyes stunned, glued to the man.  With each of them frozen I knew I should do something, but ‘something’ was too broad for me at the moment so the something I chose was to wait and see what would happen.  

And then, quick and sudden, the little man started walking towards us.  

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