She finds the light toward the bottom of the bottle.
It’s a cliché, sure, but there it is. Very satisfying. Her worries melt away, and she smiles.
She stands up from the table, ready to take a victory lap. She has to stagger backward a little, of course, because the world is that much shorter, the ground that much further away, and it takes her a minute. But her smile quickly returns, crumpled though it is, and leaning backward as her foot goes forward, she raises her red nose and rakes it logily through the air as she walked, as if she were skywriting. She takes off gaily; the world looks pretty good from up here.
She gets all the way to the corner of the table and realizes she’s forgotten something, but can’t remember what it was. She doesn’t really know where she was going — there’s no place in front of her to go — so she turns and walked along the edge of the table, taking much smaller steps this time, to give herself time to think. Where was she going? She needs something… What is it? She couldn’t for the life of her…
The corner of the table presents a new problem, and it’s obvious. It’ss all downhill from here, like always. She has no choice: she heads downhill. Her nose droops to the floor, a little further over and down with each step, until it feels like she’ss tripping over it, and all she can see is the endless drudgery in front of her feet. Never a good sign… A whimper escapes, then another, and they fuse into a low moan as she reaches the edge of the table and knows that all is lost.
What was in front of her is behind her now; the future is mired in the cracked and moldy past. There is no way out. Oblivion.
She rounds the corner lost in fate, and going down fast. Her nose drags on the floor; but it doesn’t matter; no use for social pretensions when the world is ending! Darkness begins to fold inward. Each step leads deeper into despair. The yawning chasm of null existence opens up and swallows her. She thrashes around in it, drowning, lost. After an eternity, and just before the darkness envelops her completely, she finds the corner of the table, and her eyelids flutter with the last failing quiver of hope. Beyond the corner, beyond the dimming horizon of despair, she sees a chair.
With all the strength yet available, a gargantuan effort of self-preservation, she pulls herself around the corner and, though it’s impossible to do it — she doesn’t know how she does it! — She makes it to the chair. Just as the darkness collapses around her, she falls all the way down into the chair as if it were a crevasse, and she reaches weakly, blindly, for anything at all to hold on to. But the darkness is relentless and absolute, and with her final gesture before disappearing completely, her hand finds the bottle.The feeling in her hand makes her remember — a light, a clear light of goodness and truth. But that’s all over now.
Without thinking, without knowing how or even why, she raises the bottle to her lips. And there, in the bottom of the bottle, she finds the light…
©2020 by Nick Trotter. All rights reserved.