Fiction writing allows me to express my creativity at full throttle. I can play around with half-truths and lived experiences while letting my imagination fill in the gaps. This short story details the emotional journey of a young woman trying to find meaning and purpose before her impending death.
MODERN TIMES
By Shelby Reed
The world was going to end sooner or later, we all knew that much. I had seen every news report, despite my wishes, because my mother constantly kept the TV on in our living room, always on the news, day and night. She worried more than me and I always wondered why. She had lived more life than me anyways, and there wasn’t much we could do now. She was naturally a worrier. I was glad I didn’t get that from her.
I spent most of my time then with my friends and family, or listening to music or reading books. Always at the beach. I wanted to take it all in with the time I had left. That was the only time I let myself feel the sadness of it all; when I thought about every poem I hadn’t read yet or every song I hadn’t heard or when I looked out into the ocean, 80% of it undiscovered, so much lost potential.
You spend so much time telling yourself that you have so much life left to live in an effort to convince yourself that you are living, when in reality your present self is hoping for a much more adventurous future self that never comes.
They didn’t know exactly when. They gave us rough estimates that changed slightly every few weeks. Sometimes it’d be a week sooner, sometimes a week later. Either way, we were living on borrowed time.
When my family first heard the news, we took a vacation to Europe, per my request. We started in Spain and made our way across the continent, eating and drinking and buying every touristy knick-knack our heart desired. I had never seen us so happy to be together and in a way I was almost thankful that we were dying soon. There wasn’t much room for us to resent each other anymore.
When I made the joke at dinner one night, my mother reacted like I had told her I converted to Satanism.
“You’re being disrespectful to all the life you never got to live.”
Deep down, I knew she was mourning the husband I never married, the grandkids I never gave her, the career I never had. I didn’t think about them. I had never wanted a husband anyways. Surprisingly, my brother understood me. A vacation where the two of us got along was unthinkable until then. We made jokes about it constantly, and by the end of the trip I could see, out of the corner of my eye, my mother starting to smile at them.
One night, when they told us it was a week away, I asked my family if they wanted to drive to the beach. We grabbed blankets and bottles of wine and and a speaker and snacks, and piled into the car. Something like that would’ve been unthinkable before.
When we got there, I laid the blankets out and stripped down to my bikini, feeling the cold ocean wind beating against us, and I felt at home. I always felt at home by the ocean. We laid and ate and drank and talked about things we’d done or ways we’d felt but mostly we just looked at the sky spread out above us. At this point, we had asked each other all the questions we wanted to ask.
I had avoided one on purpose because I knew that none of us knew the answer.
“Do you guys still believe in God?” I looked at my mom and dad. I knew my brother would say no.
“I’ve been praying every night,” my mom replied. I had too. It was worth a shot.
“I’m guessing God’s pretty busy right now. But he knows we’re all phonies who only started praying when death slapped us in the face.” My brother always knew how to make everyone laugh. I was jealous of it. I was jealous of a lot of things about him, despite how many times I said I hated him.
“They say drowning is the most peaceful way of dying. We could just get it out of the way,” I said, only halfway joking, watching the angry waves flowing and crashing in front of us. They didn’t look scary to me anymore like they had before, scarred from getting stuck in the riptide one too many times. Wouldn’t it be nice to have control over the way you went out? There’d been plenty of suicides the past couple months and I understood why. The waiting was agonizing.
“Oh, stop with that,” my dad said in his typical fatherly fashion. He was good at being in denial about the whole thing.
I stood up and started walking towards the waves. I thought about how it was the same beach I’d grown up on, the same beach I’d had my first kiss on and smoked my first cigarette. The water touched my feet and the crisp coldness felt good. It felt the same as every November I’d lived here before. It was comforting.
I heard my family walking in behind me, my mom pointing up at the moon and telling my brother to watch it, like she’d always had every time we sat outside growing up. The moon was important to her.
I turned my head to watch it as I went deeper and deeper into the water. The beach has a way of making you feel grateful to be alive while also reminding you that death is inevitable.
I laid my head on my mother’s shoulder and immediately, like a mother does, she knew what I was thinking.
“Drowning? Seems like it’d go against your human instinct.” I laughed.
“I guess all your end-of-the-world TV shows couldn’t have prepared us for it.”
My ounce of courage was gone and I felt a slight chill run through my body. I walked back to our blankets and wrapped myself in one, laying across my parents’ lap as my brother flipped through songs while my dad rolled his eyes at our music.
The night after we first heard, I had laid in my bed and wrote down a list of everything I wanted to do before I died. It ranged from skydiving to learning how to play the guitar to falling in love again. I imagined myself stuffing 60-years worth of experience into 6 months.
In reality, I hadn’t done even a fraction of those things I wrote down. But still, I had lived a life that I would never have been capable of before.
I closed my eyes as my family talked. The people next to me were made of the same blood that I was, and when we all turned to dirt or dust or whatever became of us, that had to mean something.
“I still believe in God,” my father said, and we all stayed quiet for a moment. He had always been a man of faith.
“Either way, it’s hard to believe we end up anywhere bad.”
It didn’t feel like the movies where the wind picks up and the sky turns extraordinary colors and the ground begins to shake as everything folds in on itself. It was slow enough for us to watch, the light coming closer and closer and I was glad I hadn’t decided to drown because it was beautiful, in a way. I remember thinking, it’s a week early. But I wasn’t sad.