By Chris Mariotti
This piece won our first Flash Fiction Competition of the year. It also appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue four of Pelican. You can view our print archive here.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
we got drunk from a bottle of port we’d been saving for a special occasion that never came. Drunk enough that the memories of us dancing took on a soft focus like the scenes in The Sound of Music when Maria and the Captain do the Laendler. The world blurred, the edges of your body seeming more like brushstrokes. When I woke the next day, I couldn’t tell if the moment when I had pressed my lips to the scars on your knuckles had been real.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
we ran out of marshmallows and when I placed the plasticised takeaway cup, patterned with native flowers onto the counter, the lady who had ordered it began to weep. She was weeping when she used two hands to seal the cardboard lid on and was weeping when she lifted it up and took her first sip. She was weeping when she turned around and walked out of the café. I suspect she may be weeping still.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
I forgot to apply sunscreen, and you stood behind me, looking at me in the mirror. Carefully, you slipped your fingernails under my peeling skin and pulled it away, the pieces of me curling up like parchment scrolls. I took me and stretched myself out, held me up to the light. It’s like the Ship of Theseus (you). How? (me). How our bodies regenerate new skin every twenty seven days: You’re new to me, always. So the person who met you isn’t here anymore? More like…the ship changes, the passengers are the same. The tight coil of skin was placed down. I felt the cool sticky relief of aloe on my back.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
we leapt the chain fence and walked into the English block of our high school. There was a water pipe we had written our heights on in Year 12, with a Blue Bic Cristal ballpoint pen and Faber Castell 2B pencil. Stand there, next to the drain, feet against the wall. I took your chin and lowered it an inch. There, perfect, stay still. We marked each other’s heights and considered how we had or hadn’t grown, the names of those year 12s vague smudges now.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
47 people messaged me goodbye. 27 of them on Instagram, 11 on Messenger, 6 SMSed me. 3 reached out on LinkedIn. I got 19 emails from various companies and websites I had purchased from or subscribed to offering condolences, sympathies, and End of Everything sales.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
we had exhausted all the standard emojis. We had combed our way through the orangutan, the lopsided downcast face, the androgynous welder, the front carriage of a monorail in profile, the knot of ginger, all of the shades of hearts, the credit card (back view), the hard cover books (volumes 1-4), the red slashed “no phones” sign, the grey square proclaiming “UP!,” the bento box, the face-with-forehead-wrapped-in-bandages, the Matryoshka Doll wearing the bottom half of its parent.
You loved the shark the most, its body curled tight, its mouth agape, innocent. I loved the ballet shoes, baby pink, tiptoed, one twisted behind at an impossible angle. We both wondered why the calendar emoji was set to Jul 17th and what the significance of this date was. We could’ve looked it up, on our phones, our laptops, your apple watch, my PC or any of our other friends’ devices that could effortlessly access most of the information the internet had to offer. We never bothered to.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
I thought, after a fortnight apart, this is the first time my stomach has been filled by our gnocchi with melting parmesan flakes, the Margaret River wine, the small pieces of ciabatta we cut up and buttered. I thought, this is the first time my lungs have breathed in your hair, your perfume, your exhaled Co2, the first time my tongue has tasted yours. Much of this skin is new to the both of us. Savour it. Savour it. We are brimming with firsts and lasts.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
we started using Google’s Emoji Kitchen. I had seen a meme about it on Instagram, had Safari’d ‘emoji combiabtion softewr,’ clicked on the blue underlined ‘You’re seeing results for___________’ and found the name off a Reddit thread.
Soon our texts were punctuated by the copy-and-pasted pictures of sharks with tears pouring from their eyes, and ballet shoes framed by the pupil of eyes like pastiche Magrittes.
Sometimes, we would sit there, tapping at the randomiser. We received:
Cross section of lungs between knife and fork
Grey symbol OK on fire,
Scales of justice caught up in hurricane,
Lightbulb with arms raised unsure,
Black heart with registered trademark symbol underneath,
Mildly disappointed minnow,
Explosion of clementines.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
you coiled your skeleton in a ball and I could count the regular rises of your vertebrae through your white Anko t-shirt. When the shuddering started, I thought my ribs might snap one after the other like a cartoon ship with poor glue, the elastic energy of the planks twanging outwards. Maybe people dive for cover. Maybe the ship hangs there for a second, half unmade, before falling to the ground. When your body slowed, I was still holding you. What’s going on? (you). I don’t know but we’re safe (me). Can you get the laptop?
My fingerprint unlocked your Macbook Air. Emoji Kitchen was already open. You click and an image of a bagel knocking over three bowling pins loads. Then a rockmelon soars over a gridiron goalpost, then a fax machine looks reluctant. I don’t know what it means. You say and begin to sob. We’re safe, we’re safe, we’re safe I say.
In the days before the Ending of Everything
it was soothing and anaesthetic in the way all social media was. I reminded myself that Emoji Kitchen ran on at least some AI infrastructure, feeling guilty as I sent you a unicorn, hair filled with CDs and skin refracting light as a disc might. What was the other option? Did I expect the same graphic artist to tirelessly combine pineapples with various fauna. To what end? There were 621 emojis on Emoji Kitchen. That would produce 385641 possible combinations if not for the many emojis that refuse to synthesise.
Did I think I could tell you everything in those days? No. There were too many combinations to get through and at once not enough. My words failed and I reached across the divide in ourselves and held you close until our bodies fused. I tapped. An hourglass emptying, brushing away a tear of betrayal. I tapped. A Mr Whippy rising between two mountains, sunlight shining from the wafer. I tapped. Two pink hearts, one larger than the other, a grey cog pressed between them, preventing them from touching. I tapped. A canoe, or several, layered over themselves, blurring. I tapped…