Persisting. Tonight the sunset has prompted a short-short story:
The sunset at the end of the world painted itself onto the sky in a pattern Ayar had never before seen. The sunlight trailed shades of pink, orange and purple across the clouds as it melted over the black hills of the shadowed moorland. Dylan couldn’t bring himself to watch it and had retreated deeper into the grey stone house at the top of the hill, waiting for everything to stop. He had taken the tablets that had been issued to all by the government and went to lay on the bed, numb and calm under their influence. Ayar, ever the optimist, kept her huge and watery eyes opened wide, afraid to blink, just in case she needed to remember the detail.
Standing at the gate of Kimble Cottage, beneath the overgrown rose arch, she was savouring the details, as they had warned that the darkness that would fall with the last drops of the sun would be unending. She did not feel anxious, holding the pills in her hand, but felt calm for the very first time in her life. There would be no tomorrow, so her anxieties had all fallen silent. Instead of being hit with her usual evening headache, she felt a lightness, almost a compulsion to dance. Calm washed over her as the last of the light retreated over the hills.
She turned from the place she had seen the very last of the sun and walked to the other side of her trimmed lawn, each step of which she knew well enough to cross in the lightless night. It was strange looking up into the sky without the reassurance of the stars.
Ayar could smell the jasmine which, oblivious to the coming apocalypse, continued to fill the air with its seductive scent. As she looked over where she knew the dry stone wall stood at the edge of the garden, she could not see any glow from where the city had been and felt relief. There were no cars on the road as there once had been and, out there, in the house in which she was born she was with those she loved the most. Her beloved Dylan and, within the upstairs of house, her sleeping daughter Adelaide, who slept under the spell of a reduced doseage of the pills distributed for the children. Ayar still did not quite believe that the end was coming, but she wasn’t willing to let her only child suffer, if suffering was all that was left.
It was just them in the end, that was Ayar’s whole world, everything that she held close would be within her reach.
Just Real Ruby 