assorted writing

The day the sun died, Siobhan kissed me for the first time.
     We stood on the cracked concrete shore of the ocean and watched it fade. There was no sand anymore; I only vaguely remember it, from stories my mother told me about my early childhood, and faded pictures in my mind of castles that crumbled under a gentle touch. Of course everything crumbles now, moisture and rot seeping into impervious concrete, impregnable steel. All things come to end.
     But no one expects to live for the first time at the very end.
     She was wearing a hand-knit dress, stained berry-red and smelling faintly of cherry. Carole always told her not to wear dyes so soon after setting. They would attract grizzers and get us both killed - or worse, it would rain and the dye would run. But the colours only stayed bright for a few washes and Siobhan loved the way they looked. Or maybe the way I looked at her when she appeared in them around some grey and dismal corner, a living breath of fresh air. We would go running over the rooftops, jumping down to the ground and imagining when the buildings soared high as birds. I would insist we stay close to the camps but she would urge me further, into the jungle, and we would play hide and seek with bones and stones crunching underfoot.
     The dying sun painted the water bronze, with hints of gold on every swell. There were a few birds circling lazily above us, either unaware of their impending deaths or resigned to a future too big for them to alter. Though we had known it was coming, I don’t think I could say either of us were prepared. It happened too fast, and even a hundred years planning for the moment wouldn’t have been enough - we’d had only thirty, and they were mostly guesses, backyard scientists with battered telescopes making predictions over vegetable patches and smoking sheds. No one had known when the exact moment would be - we had to go on living as if there would still be life tomorrow.
     It went orange, and then almost red. There was no great explosion, no sinking towards the horizon, no change in size. It faded like a reverse Polaroid photograph; the whole thing took all of ten minutes. We both stood completely still, watching it. Total silence, as the ocean lapped and birds called, and I wondered if you had to understand to mourn. If it was something only active watchers would ever do.
     When it was gone the stars were the most beautiful I had ever seen them, bright fires in an endless sky. The moon was gone, not dead but empty now, just a blank space in the sky where it no longer reflected. I wondered if it was lonely - if it was cold - if it would miss the warmth as much as we would.
     She turned on the portable lantern we had brought, and I turned towards the light. As she held it up I saw tears on her cheeks; she was crying silently, with a serene expression, and it was the saddest thing I had ever seen. Sadder than the day I buried my mother. Sadder than watching the sun die.
     And then she kissed me.
     I don’t know if she had kissed someone before, or if our lips just understood what we needed from them. I don’t know why she did it, but I understood somewhere, in jumbled parts of my mind, why you would want to kiss someone, feel their hands in your hair, feel the surety of their heartbeat, while the world around you died.