To The End Anna Lipari
foot of the tower in a nest of steel cables, seeping soft static into the stagnant air. “Well,” it said.
In the evenings, it got into the habit of sitting in the corner of the living room, tucked between my I found the end of the world underneath the great-uncle’s frayed red wingback armchair and the cell-phone tower at the top of the hill. The tall orangecrystal lamp with the burned-out bulb. “It’s almost white spire, crowned with a single blinking red time,” it told me one night, after we’d been living in beacon, floated like a neon buoy over the fog-washed that empty house together for long enough that I was evergreens; it was October, early evening, and the used to seeing it there, casting backwards shadows and lights of the neighbor’s houses were already on, their humming softly to itself. A year, maybe, or a week. faint yellow glow leaking out of the windows and I was kneeling in front of the fireplace, burning it a spilling across dark sidewalk-puddles like an oil slick. sacrifice. The fireplace was where my grandmother I could have sworn I moved away from there years used to light juniper branches every December. ago, that I left behind the house I grew up in with its long dim hallways and the greying roses on the kitchen We’d bring them back from the desert for her each wallpaper and the dark, serrated silhouette of the pine- Thanksgiving, wrapped in grocery bags and tied with crested hill looming over the backyard. There had been twine; the brown paper would catch flame and peel away, and the skeleton of the branch inside would a time when I packed up suitcases and took myself to glow vermillion, and the whole room would smell like a college dorm, and then later to a little white-walled open sky. I was trying to strike a match, but I’d never blank-slate apartment in the middle of a city. But no been all that good at it, and I kept getting nothing but matter how many times I left I always seemed to end little curls of smoke. “We haven’t got long,” it said. up back there, walking in those grey streets, always in “I know,” I said. “I’ve known for a long time the direction of that tower. I think there used to be a now. I think it has something to do with that tower.” barbed wire fence around its base, but at that point it “I’m thinking next Thursday,” it said. “For the was long gone. The end of the world was resting at the world to end, I mean.”
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