The Mayans Were Right [writing prompt]

The world was a mess….

Kevin crawled from beneath his make-shift shelter and lay against a tree. Everything he had ever known, gone with a literal flash. His mind couldn’t wrap around the concept. No one had predicted this, not even the Mayans.

He closed his eyes and let his mind wander for a minute back to the memories he had of his family, Jeanine, his job, his friends. Strangely, his mind kept returning to something in the seventh grade. He was playing on a ladder with Jimmy, the neighborhood clown. In reality, he was supposed to clean the gutters, but who really does that. Kevin remembered trying to reach, then overextending…

Next then, he was in darkness.

It took him three days to regain consciousness and even then he didn’t feel everything was alright. Who could he tell though?

Was this the reason that he was still alive today?

The first alerts started as I drove home from work. Honestly, I thought it was a hoax. The idea of the world ending becasue an ancient calender said so, was insane. As other cars started to speed past me on the freeway, I could tell that I was not the only one hearing this madness. Who in the hell would do something so stupid, these people are already paranoid.

I sped up myself, wanting to be off the road and away from these crazy people driving like idiots. I needed to be with my family, that’s all I could think about now. I started to move through the radio stations, hoping to hear more, and that’s when reality hit me. The emergency broadcast system was blaring now.

“It has been reported that the volcano, we call Yellowstone National Park, is becoming dangerously active. The entire midwest, iss at risk, but to what extent, no one knows. Everyone is asked to go home, and wait for further information,” the radio said.

I laughed at the comments. Who was he kidding, it would be mass panic in a few minutes. Home, I knew that I had to get home. I could see the people around me starting to drive more erratically. I would imagine I should stop at the store. Would it be a mad house there too? Maybe it’s too early, and a lot of people would not have heard any of this.
Home. That’s all that I could think about. Was everyone safe at home. Was my son, who is in college safe. I felt myself start to panic, just like those around me. I reached for my cell phone to call him, to call home, but I could not get through. I drove, home. I just need to get home, to call my family, to…I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do.

‘Not with a bang, but a whimper.’ Well, that might be what
someone said, but that’s not how it was for me. It started quietly enough, with
a few faraway stars going out. At first, there were just a few, so you couldn’t
be really sure it was happening. Perhaps a stray wisp of cloud had got in the
way, you might think. But then another, and another, twinkled their last. Soon
there were whole patches of blackness in the night sky, where once there had
been a milky way.

I don’t know much about constellations and all that stuff. I
can spot Orion, though: his belt, and the stars that are supposed to be his
shoulders and legs or something. Because I was comfortable with Orion, I
quickly found it in the sky and stared at it, willing it to stay. Then the middle
star in the belt went out. It was kind of creepy, something that isn’t ever
supposed to change being altered like that. Then the other stars in Orion
disappeared, one by one, in just a few seconds.

By now there were very few stars left, and I hoped, against
all the available evidence, that this was just some weird weather effect. But
there had been no clouds for days, and none were forecast. And there was the
moon, a crescent low to the horizon, shining as clear as anything. You could
see the man in the moon’s face, looking down on us like he always did. I wondered
if he was as scared as I was.

And then the moon went out. Not just switched off like you
might turn off an ordinary light – it was more like what happens when a bulb,
worn out by too many thousands of hours illuminating our pointless activities,
finally gives up. A short sharp flash, and then nothing but the afterglow in
your retina, as the nerve endings recover from overload.

There was an inverted image of the moon in my sight, but
nothing else. All the electric lights of the town below me had been extinguished
at the same moment, and now there was total darkness of a kind I’d never
experienced before. And then came the bang, louder than any bang there has ever
been, except perhaps the Big One that had started this all. And then there was
nothing.

The scorched earth. And what has scorched it? The species that had a soul, that believed in its heart of hearts that it was different, was higher, was exceptional. That species’ food and its fuels and its endless encroaching “development” burned the earth out from under a growing number of other species, absent the realization that those other species were vital to its own survival. And so humanity plunged down the professionally proselytized path of endless growth, endless consuming, endless exploitation of its own environment.

A scorched and barren and splintering shell of the once-blue planet hurtles out of its path through space,colliding with other bodies, careening into holes in space, making its own holes in space.

And humanity, with its sibling species, sleeps the big sleep. Passionate socialists sleep with ardent capitalists, Islamists with back-slidden Baptists, the agnostic with the absolutely convicted, and at last there is peace. There’s no further need to convince anyone of anything, no eternal truths to be infidel’d, no interminable worship service in the sky. No saviors, no judges, no fiery punishment except the results of actions and the progressing time-line of the cosmos.

And oblivion.

Fragments of the scorched earth.

The spaceship landed in front of the Mayan pyramid. The pitch-black world the Iquise coveted for nitrate offered no resistance. One alien stumbled over something which flapped in the breeze. He bent down and swung the flashlight to
reveal a journal. He picked it up and started to read.

December 21st

5:45 a.m.

“Now that we are here on the longest day of the year, I regret ever coming, but I can’t admit it to Tom. This has been an expensive endeavor. There are hundreds of people camped around us, and most of them a loony. The journalists are drunk and the sun is due to come up at 6:03. God, I wish I was back at home in our bed, snuggled together. This is a hideous curiosity gone insane.”

5:55 a.m.

“How many people have predicted the end of the world, how
many times? I feel a fool.”

6:10 a.m.

The sun is coming. Have the astrologists got it all wrong?
There are bits of prayer arising out of dark silence. Did the world stop revolving?

6:39 a.m.

No birds, insects, or golden rays of light to welcome the morning. It is not the longest day but the longest night. Breathing is hard, and people are moaning on the ground, grasping for air, some screaming—how many dead?

6:45 a.m.

Tom is dead. Everyone is dying. I can’t

The Mayans were right.
The world ended today. 12/21/12

Then how is it I am able to write my story? If I am dead already, then from where do
these reflections arise? I believe
firmly that, while the physical body is returning to soil, our mental being, journeys
forward. And it is this spiritual life (“it”)
which is addressing you now.

“It” may not even be aware that all that is left is it. From my peripheral knowledge of Buddhism, the
body experiences a physical death, but the spirit does not. The principal goals of Buddhism are divided
between elevation and detachment.

The first goal focuses on attaining happiness and welfare in
this life or future lives. The second
goal is liberation. Radical detachment, purification,
the destruction of mental defilements, attachments, and hindrances.

Why this straying off the topic of “the world ended today”? Because the world will never end. It will always be here—the only difference is
just our perception of what is “out there”.
One should never fear death as
you will always be “here” in one form or another.

I wish to end this
short discourse with a quote from the Dhammapada, Chapter 26, “The Brahmin”*,
verses 411 and 414:

(411)

“Having no
attachments,

And, through understanding, free
of doubts,

Whoever is
established in the Deathless

I call
a Brahmin.”

(414)

Whoever has
passed beyond this troublesome road,

This difficult path, this
samsara, this delusion,

Who has
crossed over, gone beyond,

Who is a meditator, free of
craving and doubt,

Without
clinging, released,

I call
a brahmin..”:

If the world ends today, 12/21/12, it is the end of your
physical body only. Your spirit will
endure forever.

* Brahmin is someone
of worthy conduct and spiritual maturity.

Linda Wernsing

Submission to The Write Practice 12/21/12

Susan stood silhouetted against the blackened sky, her headlights the only illumination in the ancient dark. Her young son and daughter clung to her jeans and squinted their eyes, trying to see out over the valley below. Ash piled up around them and filled their noses. Rosy sneezed into the sleeve of her pink snowsuit. Soon she would be much too warm in the downfilled clothes and all three of them would be stripping down to their pajamas and socks.
They hadn’t had the time to get dressed when the percussive sounds infiltrated the little cabin in the hills. They had piled into the truck, already meticulously packed with essentials and a few toys for her children. Susan had been driving for two days stopping only to let the children rest and let off some energy. They needed to reach higher ground before it began. Rosy and Thomas had both had nightmares the week before. They said the trees would uproot themselves and walk free over the cities and towns and birds would drop fire and rocks onto the houses. Tigers would roam free in the streets and drag down mommies and daddies and little kids. They had cried in her arms while she held them tight, horrified by the synchronocity and timing of their dreams.
The only other dream her twins had told her about came just before her husband was killed in a plane crash. They had wailed and screamed about a flying dinosaur grabbing him from the air and flinging him toward the ground into a big hole filled with chomping teeth and fire ants. Disturbing as it was, she hadn’t thought anything of it until…
So last week she had wiped their tears, dropped them off at school and gone to the outdoor supply and army surplus stores. She stocked up on water purifying tablets, snare wires, fire starters, an all weather tent, big hunting knives and every other tool she could remember from her treasured wilderness survival guide. It had been her childhood dream to take off into the woods and fend for herself. She absorbed tips and tricks like a sponge and passed on her woods lore to her children. Who says 3 year olds can’t start a fire with twigs and flint? Hers certainly could and much more. Of course she hadn’t dreamed that she would be driving North into the high forests of Canada. The pines and lakes were a beacon of hope, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near people panic stricken and fighting in the streets. If the world was going to end, her children would see the blue sky and feel the pungent earth, their last view of humanity would not be mobs ransacking stores and desperate mothers looking for lost babies.
She never expected this darkness.
“Mommy, where did the sun go?” Thomas sucked on a gloved thumb.
“It’s hiding behind the ash, see?” She pointed to what she hoped was a glimmer of sunlight, grey against the blackness.
“The birds stole it away, Tommy. It isn’t coming back until the tigers go to sleep, remember?”
“We have to move on darlings, I think it’s only another day or so to the big pine forests.” She crossed her fingers and sent a silent prayer through the ash littered sky to the god who’s day had finally come. Please, just let us make it to the trees.