Buy The Silent Hustler
by Sean Meriwether
[Lethe Press, 10.2009]

Originally published on GetUnderground.com [2002]

A Small Empty Room

“They’re all gone,” I tell him. “Just you and me. Just us.” He snorts as if he’d heard me, then sits up abruptly. “Are we dead?” His words reverberate along the metal walls and return distorted by echo. “Are we dead, yet?”

“Alan.” I say his name with the comfort of prayer.

“I don’t want to die.” A violent coughing seizes him. He sits up and pulls away from me. His breath rattles. I know it will end soon.

I pull him back down into my lap, he is clammy and feverish, and his ragged breath is punctuated by rasping coughs. I hold him for hours as his breath falters, then stops. There is nothing left to do. A concrete block tumbles down into the stairwell, sending pebbles skittering across the floor to mark Alan’s death. Then silence. The darkness becomes my own.

In this infinite dark, I am reminded of the nighttime sky of my childhood. My father stood with me beneath the stars and taught me about the huge galaxies floating in space, clusters of light and dark with millions of light years between them. My universe of cells, a swirling cosmos, is winding down upon itself, collapsing into the raw materials it was created from. Dust to dust.

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