Petrified
This is not what your therapist meant when they encouraged self-preservation. But their advice scattered to the wind, their meaning lost, as the fires spread across the city - the same way the minerals will filter through your body. A capillarity of death: your tissue dissolving, your limbs transforming to stone instead of ash.
This is the way to prepare for the end. Bathe yourself in salt water to open your pores, preparing your skin for its impending calcification. If you must enter the water along the rising shorelines of the coast, leave early, before the throngs of salvation-seekers have further polluted the tides with their plastic bottles and self-delusions.
Dust yourself in gypsum, breathing in the chalky mineral so it may coat your lungs and laminate your last words in its milky embrace.
Let your feet slip beneath the ground, bones cracking as they twist and gnarl, sinking into the rocky earth, anchoring whatever remnants of you will linger in this desert. As your legs harden, minerals eating the thin wisps of your fibrous muscles, look up at the night sky. Far from the lights, your chosen plot might allow you to see the arching flight paths jettisoning across the sky, the billionaires’ rockets escaping this world they wasted.
Smear honey across your eyes, sealing your lids to the dying earth. Perhaps someday the sages or scientists will discover a solution, a way to soften your fossilized body, and crack your lids like a horse chestnut, your brown irises peeking through your hardened shell.
Do not struggle when your arms stiffen, immobile, the way they were when you were young: a different night of watching the sky, a last meteor shower barely visible, a hand untaken in the filtered light, lips unkissed while standing in a driveway. As the minerals solidify your breast, you’ll wonder where she is now, why you lost touch, why you never touched one another, and yet how you did touch one another.
Do not overthink your face. You are not a work of art, positioned and polished for the pleasure of whatever species comes next, creatures evolutionarily primed to inhabit this wasteland. Your smile or scowl will not make them think any better of you or your kind. How could they?
Do not second guess your decision. Others went off the grid, bunkered away as if life were a post-apocalyptic film and zombies were the worst we could fear. (They are not.) Some walked into the sea, hoping evolution would save them, gills sprouting from their sun-burned flesh before they drowned. (It did not.)
You have always known your body would become a fossil. Perhaps not this soon. As a child you curled up inside the footprint of a dinosaur while on a vacation in this desert, hiding from the world. You wanted to sink into the clay, believing the dinosaurs might be there, just below the surface, pressing their bones up to your cradled body.
Let yourself stretch down into the dirt, reaching out to those who came before, another species extinct from this red, dry earth. Wait for their gentle touch as you breathe your last word: “Home.”
This is the way to prepare for the end. Bathe yourself in salt water to open your pores, preparing your skin for its impending calcification. If you must enter the water along the rising shorelines of the coast, leave early, before the throngs of salvation-seekers have further polluted the tides with their plastic bottles and self-delusions.
Dust yourself in gypsum, breathing in the chalky mineral so it may coat your lungs and laminate your last words in its milky embrace.
Let your feet slip beneath the ground, bones cracking as they twist and gnarl, sinking into the rocky earth, anchoring whatever remnants of you will linger in this desert. As your legs harden, minerals eating the thin wisps of your fibrous muscles, look up at the night sky. Far from the lights, your chosen plot might allow you to see the arching flight paths jettisoning across the sky, the billionaires’ rockets escaping this world they wasted.
Smear honey across your eyes, sealing your lids to the dying earth. Perhaps someday the sages or scientists will discover a solution, a way to soften your fossilized body, and crack your lids like a horse chestnut, your brown irises peeking through your hardened shell.
Do not struggle when your arms stiffen, immobile, the way they were when you were young: a different night of watching the sky, a last meteor shower barely visible, a hand untaken in the filtered light, lips unkissed while standing in a driveway. As the minerals solidify your breast, you’ll wonder where she is now, why you lost touch, why you never touched one another, and yet how you did touch one another.
Do not overthink your face. You are not a work of art, positioned and polished for the pleasure of whatever species comes next, creatures evolutionarily primed to inhabit this wasteland. Your smile or scowl will not make them think any better of you or your kind. How could they?
Do not second guess your decision. Others went off the grid, bunkered away as if life were a post-apocalyptic film and zombies were the worst we could fear. (They are not.) Some walked into the sea, hoping evolution would save them, gills sprouting from their sun-burned flesh before they drowned. (It did not.)
You have always known your body would become a fossil. Perhaps not this soon. As a child you curled up inside the footprint of a dinosaur while on a vacation in this desert, hiding from the world. You wanted to sink into the clay, believing the dinosaurs might be there, just below the surface, pressing their bones up to your cradled body.
Let yourself stretch down into the dirt, reaching out to those who came before, another species extinct from this red, dry earth. Wait for their gentle touch as you breathe your last word: “Home.”
Shelly Jones, PhD (she/they) is a Professor of English at a small college in upstate New York, where she teaches classes in mythology, folklore, and writing. Her speculative work has previously appeared in Podcastle, New Myths, The Future Fire, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @shellyjansen.