New Flash Fiction: A Song About The End Of The World

What would you do if you knew the world was going to end? In our latest flash fiction story, Mark Patrick Lynch has some suggestions and they involve witchcraft and singing whales. Mark lives and writes in the UK. His short fiction, mainstream and genre, has appeared in print anthologies and journals ranging from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine to Zahir. His book HOUR OF THE BLACK WOLF is published by Robert Hale Limited. An ebook original novellaWhat I Wouldn't Give is available for ereaders. You can find him online at markpatricklynch.blogspot.com and @markplynch on Twitter.

A SONG ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Mark Patrick Lynch

My girlfriend told me the world was going to end. She’d heard about it from the whales. She understood their song and had been listening in while she took a bath, surrounded by scented candles. 

As you can imagine, my girlfriend’s special. 

She’s a witch. The full hocus-pocus. And yes, she can ride a broomstick - and yes also, I love her a great deal. When she told me the bad news, I believed her without question.

If the world’s ending, you don’t mess about, so we left the city and headed for the mountains. We didn’t go there because we thought we’d be safe (the whales had been clear – nowhere was going to survive this), we drove to the mountains to get some quiet, and because for a long time we’d talked about taking a trip there. Beauty’s all the more pleasing when there’s only a short time in which to enjoy it. 

My girlfriend packed her broomstick. She pulled it from the back of the car after we’d got the bags out and forced open the cabin door. It was a real Grizzly Adam’s cabin, a single log room with a stone chimney at one end. I laughed when I saw what she was waving at me.

“Wanna try?” she said.

I was a hopeless failure. Although my girlfriend could jump into the air and thread in and out of the trees without a thought, I couldn’t even balance on the stick without falling off. Flying was an ambition too far.

We had a transistor radio with us, and in the evenings, if the atmospherics were right, we listened to reports of the coming end of the world. The whales had been right, though I found it odd to think they’d be singing about it. Humanity certainly wasn’t singing about it – well, apart from that old REM song – humanity was going crazy ape about it. 

For quite a while we were unaffected in the woody mountains. But eventually that changed. One night – it was dark blue rather than black – the moon went fuzzy. Silver flakes spread out from it as if it had been made of snow. The next night there was no moon. Days later strange ash started to fall and the sky was constantly grey. We woke one morning to the brightest flash of light, which was followed by the distant krump  of an explosion, and the earth bucked and the cabin rattled and our pallet bed buckarooed. Our storm lantern swung on its hook and took a long time to settle.

# # # # #

I know we don’t have long. My girlfriend casts spells to help us sleep nights. But we are scared now.

Before everything comes undone, I’ll put this note in a bottle. If creatures with intelligence pass this way, they might find it floating in the empty space where Earth once orbited and translate it. 

Maybe they’ll be whales. 

If you are, sing kind things about us. Somehow my girlfriend might hear you.