The Second Sun
The following (very) short story was written on the morning of 1st October 2024. It reflects how I was feeling about the world at the time with the chaos that is currently engulfing humanity and the failure of leading countries to get a grip.
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The man sat on the green grassy hill and leaned against the giant Sequoia tree searching for a final solitude in this pristine place. The fresh chill of the gentle wind against his cheekbones and the smell of Petrichor hung in the air. He looked around him at the lush swaying trees reaching high in the midday sun. It was a lovely day, but its beauty hid the horrors that lay beneath and across its blood stained soil.
He let out a deep anguished sigh as a feeling of melancholy overwhelmed his fearful body and he struggled to find any sense of felicity. His once effervescent personality now evaporated as his fears on the plight of the world were foremost in his mind.
As he sat in this gorgeous place, he was aware of the bombs being dropped on one nation from another. Imaginary lines in the sand had been drawn and each warned the other not to cross them. Yet they did, and all hell broke loose. All for the momentary ownership of a fraction of a dot that was never theirs to give anyway. Yet they cared not, at the agonizing plight they were creating for themselves. As Ouroboros eats its own tail, here was humanity devouring itself; such was the destiny of a species that did not value compassion and kindness towards its fellow man. Their conduct was ineffable.
Many countries were at war with each other, leaders calling each other out for practising a different ideology to their own in a dreadful rage. The hatred boiled up and the sense of vengeance became strong. Yet, this was not the people’s doing, they did not vote for any of this, not the donation of money or bombs, and neither was they asked. It was their surreptitious leaders that were the problem, and a family in one country was the same as a family in another country, trying to make ends meet and live a happy and prosperous life. Yet the corrupt one’s persisted in their atrocious ambitions and no elixir could mend their nature. The persistent news stories each day getting worse on worse and the continued anxiety of it all flooded the essence of his being.
A few birds sang around him in a mellifluous last sonnet. Momentarily, a gorgeous winged creature descended and landed on his knee. A Monarch butterfly with a striking pattern of black and gold and its antennas slowly moving around its body searching for hope. Its compound eyes appeared to look deep into his soul, but they both felt the presence of time’s arrow and it pointed strongly in a particular direction. For this was the last metamorphosis of an ephemeral race, and it was awful that it had failed. The butterfly lifted and fluttered towards the treeline for its final rest, as it got caught in the gossamer fabric of a spider’s web and met its end in a scene of suffering and terror so undeserved for such a gentle creature.
He felt the luminous heat from another sun enter the horizon. It was beautiful, and its bright orange glow lit up the surrounding landscape as it rose high into the stratosphere. A bright ethereal display of light appeared before him in a scene of opalescence. He never knew that the world’s end could be so pretty as he sat their transfixed at one manifestation of Krishna’s many infinite forms. The cries of the terrified children went unanswered and the prayers of the faithful were in vain. It was only in that last moment that those leaders paused and thought for just a fraction of a second, at the realisation of what they had done. For that was all the time they had left.
There would never be another melodious musical composition scored to a sheet. There would never be another moving poem to lift the spirits of the seekers. No more mathematical equations to reveal yet another part of nature’s true face. No brush would again touch a canvas to depict a world once blessed. No more films to make us laugh and cry and no more dancing to the beat of a drum. All human creativity finalised into destruction and the conservation of energy goes on. There would be no more dreams or ambitions and even the last soliloquy had come to its final rest in this place.
This is the shortest story, which is fitting for the shortest civilization that came to pass as the incandescent light of the world went out. The distant stars looked on at the creation of a second star in the galaxy for a brief moment and they felt a sense of sadness of what could have been and now was not. The Cosmos fell silent once again into tranquillity, and ultimately it didn’t even remember they were once here.
