the last star

1/15/20 - “Flax-golden tales” is a writing exercise created by Erin Morgenstern, and they are 10-sentence short stories inspired by photographs. Here’s one I wrote from a writing session I had w/ a friend.

The night wind slaps your face as you climb, stinging the sensitive skin above your lip where sweat has collected. From the rough stone, the tips of your fingers are cherry pits, raw and red and useless. A bark of laughter escapes you. You are the last breathing thing on this earth, and still, you sweat, still, you bleed.

From the zenith, the last star begins to plummet; it leaves a thin streak as it cuts through the velvet night, as though some god split the sky as you would the flesh of peaches and dying rabbits: merciless yet gentle.

Lifting your arms in wordless prayer, you offer a final supplication to anyone left listening, and, because you want to see the end as much as you don’t want to know it, you open your eyes, and—

You tell yourself the sluicing flames, the dying light of pale lightning, the somber glow of a last morning, are terrible and destructive and sad, that the sight does not make your final breath catch.

You tell yourself the reason your eyes water is because of melancholy, because of the cold, brittle mountain air, because of things that will be lost forever, because you are the lonely, last consciousness of this world.

In fact, you do not tell yourself anything, for must anything be said of how wonderful this earth was to have held you, of how beautiful it is to be born, to sweat, to bleed? Because the you, who had lived in this world, had loved it, and the you, who will be reborn in the next, will love just as sweetly.