The World After
by Ken Sanes
Searching in the distant future, I discovered a very different world
from the one I was familiar with. The roads and abandoned buildings were
like nothing I recognized, and the land itself had been reshaped,
mostly, I think, by natural forces. Even the cemetery with my grave in
it was missing, and no stone marker revealed where it had once been
located. But I did find the ruins of a house surrounded only by some
weeds, and I thought it might contain a relic or trace of my own time.
Despite some misgivings, I went in through an opening in the front wall
and began to conduct my usual search through the piles of debris on the
floor. It wasn’t long before I found something: a photograph inside a
metal frame, showing four generations of a family, smiling, with their
arms linked, in what may have been their last time together. On the left
side of the family portrait, an old woman was holding up the only child like
she was showing him off for the camera. The other adults looked over at
him as he grinned, basking in the attention. In another part of the same
room, I discovered what looked like the remains of a comfortable place
to sit and read, with the shattered pieces of a light and the skeleton
of a soft chair. I pushed back the chair for its final time as it
cracked and collapsed to the floor. But as I examined the house’s
contents, it became increasingly clear that these were the ruins of
another humanity, with another history than the one I knew. The
handwritten letters I discovered, scattered in what was probably a
bedroom, upstairs, weren’t even readable, and no matter how long I looked at them,
they still contained whatever secrets they once revealed. And the
oversized rodents, waiting to see if I would oblige their gnawing hunger
as they scurried along the perimeter, weaving in and out of the
half-broken walls, weren’t like anything I knew, either. No, I thought
to myself, this isn’t it; I still haven’t found a connection. Is it
possible that my memories are themselves just a dream? Then, as it
started to get dark, I walked outside and noticed twisted pieces of
metal in the empty yard that looked like they had once been part of a
machine, perhaps a vehicle of some sort. That’s odd, I thought to myself
-- how could I have missed that going in? At that point, I began to
wonder if I was even coming out of the same house. But I put my doubts
off to one side and began to cross an expanse of land, heading toward
something I could almost make out on the north horizon. Overhead, there
was a large moon and the night sky was full of stars. But the pattern of
the constellations wasn’t the same as the one I knew, and there was
another light in the sky that was smaller than the moon, but considerably
larger than a star. I looked at it for a long time, unable to figure out
if it was natural or artificial -- unable to figure out what kind of
thing had added its reflected light to the darkness. Standing on this
barren landscape, between the ruin and something in the distance, under
the canopy of an almost alien sky, I realized that I was no longer dead
because my death wasn’t part of this world. I was neither dead nor
alive, in an age that was too far removed from my own time.