Written by: Lucy Lyttle
Third Place Winner of the Jennie Hackman Memorial Prize for Short Fiction
An endling is the last known individual of a species or subspecies. Once the endling dies, the species becomes extinct. […] Booming Ben, a solitary heath hen (Tympanuchus cupido cupido), was last seen 11 March 1932 on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. – “Endling”, Wikipedia
It is 11 March 1932, and something is wrong on Martha’s Vineyard.
The world is ending today. The sky is a dark color. And Ben hurts in his chest like he’s hurt for a long, long time.
Ben is back in the open and he doesn’t know why, and something is pulling him anyway.
There used to be something here, he thinks. Some purpose to this place that’s been long buried. To this old, aching body he manages to wield, but Ben can’t remember why he’s so sure of it.
This place has been shadows and grass and empty forever. Forever, now, this place has been nothing but cruelty and cruel. He doesn’t know what he’s doing here, or why it feels the way that it feels, but he’s here now, anyway. And he can’t remember why.
It is 11 March 1932, and something is wrong on Martha’s Vineyard.
He’s supposed to dance, he thinks. He thinks he’s meant to sing, but he’s too old for that, now, so he just stretches his wings.
He’s too old for lots of things and he can’t remember why.
Today, he thinks, he’s too old for everything.
He’s too old to remember what he wants to forget.
He’s too old to remember brothers or the empty winter nights that can still them. Too old to remember where the pain in his chest could have gone. Or why a strange, lilting song has breached the surface of his lungs to replace it.
He’s too old to remember what it could possibly be for, or how he ever could have learned it.
How he once heard it torn from his mother’s grey throat by claws blood-white and a creature feral-black that didn’t know any better than hunger like he didn’t know any better than pain.
He’s too old to fight the weight that still brings him here. That makes him dance like a fool. He’s far too old.
Far too old, he’s eight years old, and eight years too far gone, waded into the wrongness, to understand anything that he’s ever been anymore.
He’s too old to fight against it. To be anything but Ben.
It is 11 March 1932, and something is wrong on Martha’s Vineyard.
And so he dances. And he dances. And, good god, he thinks, it hurts. Until he is spreading his wings, and the world is spreading with him, and he can’t remember why it shouldn’t. And he thinks it feels wondrous.
And he thinks, maybe, it might swallow him whole.
And he thinks, maybe, he might like it to.
And he thinks, maybe, he would like to sleep, soon, forever, because he has never been this tired in his long, tired life. And his chest hurts like he swallowed a stone and it’s stuck somewhere inside him—between where it was and where it will be—and he wants it out like he wants so violently to remember.
He thinks he’s alone now.
He thinks he might be the last living thing on this Earth.
And he thinks, what a beautiful thing that is to be.
And the sky shouldn’t be this grey, but he can’t remember why.
And he can’t remember why it matters.
And he can’t remember dying.
It is 12 March 1932, and something is wrong on Martha’s Vineyard.
And it is never going to be right ever again.