The Last

Writing Prompt – No Time Constraint.

[The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door… ]

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door. He glanced furtively at the window. A smidgen of light still lingered in the sky among the myriad of stars now blooming. The last of the dusk. He ignored the door, hunched over a prize faintly illuminated by the dying embers of the fire in his hearth.

The knock came again and he clutched the blanket he wore tighter around him, trying to fight off the worst of the evenings chill, not entirely brought on by the cold winter air. The embers popped and sizzled, and the man’s anxious eyes were torn from the window to a faded painting above the fireplace, and the humming white crystal held beneath.

A woman sat straight in the portrait, her ebony hair and eyes burned with a heat not unlike the embers. Beside her, a thin, willowy girl stood the splitting image of her mother bar for her hazel eyes. Passion and indifference.

The knock came again and a crash echoed in the room, the wooden chair now overturned as the man turned to face the door.

“Leave me alone!”

His voice, harsh like sand paper, was heavy with emotions he could not contain.

“I don’t want to see you anymore.” He closed his eyes and stood panting from his outburst, tucking a cylindrical object into his pocket.

A small jingle of the handle brought him back to himself, a creak of the knob brought a moan from his lips, a crack of the door a sob from his chest.

He fell to his knees, sobbing the torrent of sadness no longer held back. A pair of small hands reached for his face, a pair of larger ones for his shoulders. Desolation and isolation.

The man launched to his feet, the last of his will defeated. He shrugged off the hands and grabbed the handle to the door, pulling and escaping his self-contained exile. Stride after stride he kept his destination in sight through the dim evening light; a cliff in the distance. The snow grew deeper, the air colder, but he kept going.

A door slammed in the distance. The door to his memories shutting forever. It did not matter. Not anymore. He stopped, and reached out a shivering hand, not quite touching the silvery barrier surrounding his small abode, the only safe place in the world.

Two pairs of hands reached back, frozen in time, perfect in their icy, crystalline shape.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” he replied to the accusing cries in their unmoving features. He withdrew his hand and instead took the small tube from his pocket.

“I’ve been so lonely without you girls. We’ll make up the lost years, I promise.”

He pushed in the end of the tube and near a painting in the cabin, the last humming in the world stopped.

Somewhere deep on the mountains, a cabin sits frozen. No longer persistent are the nightmares of the last man on Earth.