Kindle For Fire

By D. V. Cortez

I held my wife as she cried, the clouds covering the earth parted and the stars that were so very safe and far away were visible for the first time; so close, and so beautifully dotted in oblivion that it was all we could do to hold each other close and ignore them. I held her tight, my muscles taught as I dared not let go. I could smell her sweet scent, the kiwi-strawberry aroma of her conditioner, the light but perfumed smell of her almond skin. I took it all in deeply, holding my breath as I closed my eyes to her, remembering her this way, beautiful, my perfect angel. Elaine, her name rolled off my tongue the way that beads of sweat rolled off the backs of us two young lovers in heat in the back of my pickup. It was my shoulders she first held onto while I chose to hold onto her gaze, her breath cooling the moisture on my lips, rocking with her in the light of the moon so many ages ago. On this night though, it was not passion or friction of sexual embrace that heated the night air.

I hoped at this moment, clutching her beneath the veil of stars that she thought of me as I did of her; my other, my best, and my love. We had returned to this place many times before, our tradition, our romance. I could feel the tremble of her body, but I wondered now if it were me, if it were her, or if it was the floor beneath us. And I knew as she knew the truth of it, we all were shaking.

The mountains had split open and the crust of our planet howled with a bellowing agony and anger, spewing geysers of white hot molten rock among the remains of our technic civilization. The oceans began to drain into the vast fissures of the planet as the Earth convulsed and vomited its inorganic molten organs onto the surface, singeing and devastating everything it touched. Trees collapsed or burned to a blackened husk, cars melted and exploded with the intense heat of the rivers of magma flowing through the canals of our sky scrapers and buildings. Steel, plastiform, concrete and brick ripped, tore and crumbled into mangled corpses of alien and painful architecture. Everywhere was burning; the night sky was blood red, aglow in the fires of hell on Earth; chaos incarnate. The day side of the shuddering planet was black with soot, smoke and ash while the night side glowed a ginger and crimson hue.

The sound of a dying planet was fearsome; a deep echoing howl beneath our feet, the smell of burnt wood, flesh and other-worldly stenches arose from every new break as the destruction tore at the artificial and fabricated and stung my eyes. The scent of my lover that had always calmed and soothed me ran together now, mixing with the choking sulfur and smoke of the world that smoldered around us. I looked at the remains of the horizon behind the woman in my arms, eerily stirring in the distance where I could see through the haze and the explosions of rock and earth.

Humankind had run its course. We were the inheritors of this mechanized automated world, with every tree cut down, every glacier melted for drinking water, every forest razed only to be covered with a metalloid concrete skin we called development. Streets and interways were cut and fabricated, interconnecting vast contaminating cities that grew as cancer, on the flesh of the world; imprisoning the globe beneath a synthetic prison of industry and technology. If the planet had a voice, its tranquil song would be tarnished with the weeping of its pain. And we, the idle and undeserving caretakers who had ignored her warnings and who had gutted out her every resource, would suffer as she suffered.

Everywhere man and machine cut into her body, she would remember it as trespass against her. For eons, she kept us safe from harm against the vastness of space and the unknowns of the universe, she had grown on us, and we on her. From the birth of our civilization to the age of space faring cultures she has nurtured and provided for us in her own way. Was I not a good mother? She was mother. We were her children. We have been disparaging, inconsiderate, and complacent. We have taken her and her gifts for granted, and out of her everlasting love for us, it was time to put us out of our misery. But still, I wanted life, I wanted time, I felt betrayed. I so much wanted to scream and punch the ground I stood on, and cry out to her, “Mother, Why?!” But she, bereft of patience would say, because I loved you, and you have abandoned me. But we would not hear her answer. In our selfish ways, we would simply ask why me?

I stood at the foot of the sea as it steamed and frothed angrily back into the crust of the planet, holding my wife Elaine as she cried, her gorgeous auburn hair more radiant than ever, her skin softer than I remembered, and her eyes so deeply amazingly blue when she starred at me by the receding waters. Make it stop… her eyes were saying. I can’t….

She clenched her eyes tightly shut and sunk back into my chest while we held each other in a place we knew so well. What I wouldn’t give for another hour with her, I yearned, as I rested my head onto hers. So much I should have said and done, so many things I wish I hadn’t. But I can be here…now. I held her tightly to my chest offering what little comfort I could. Words were fleeting, but as we huddled together in the silence of our breathing, I knew she loved me, and I her. In these last minutes I thought of my children grown and gone, the times we fought and screamed at each other, laughed at each other, and the day at the beach when my skinned burned red and Elaine, the most beautiful girl in my world, had offered me SPF 80.

I watched in awe as the atmosphere above us two split open, revealing the elegance of the midnight starscape in a thunderous clap. The earth trembled and ripped apart in her last convulsions throwing us to the sand of the beach where we returned. I got to my knees and grabbed for her and she crawled to me, tightly nestled into my arms we sank back to the ground. As the fires and flames of molten rock and ash began raining down from the sky about us, and the soft winds of the sea turned into a blistering wave of fire, all I could say to Elaine was, “Shhhh shhhh shhhh. Everything will be o...”