Julian sat on the large gray boulder at the roadside. Its perfectly flat top invited him to take a short rest. His feet seemed to have gotten larger since he started his journey. The sides of his shoes pressed into them squeezing the blood from his toes. He crossed an ankle over a knee and yanked off a battered black sneaker. The cool air easily passed through his threadbare sock, kissing the raw skin of his little toe.
You could say that Julian had walked far, but he wouldn’t say that. Julian referred to what he did as wandering. In fact, that’s exactly what he had told his wife before he left the house. “Just going out for a bit of wandering,” he’d said, pulling the screen door closed behind him. She’d been in the kitchen cleaning up the lunch dishes and Julian wasn’t even sure she’d heard him.
He wondered what she was doing now. Over the years he’d gotten older, but he couldn’t help but imagine her looking just the same as she had then—smooth olive skin and dark almond eyes. Her black hair wound into a tight bun as she stood by the front window with her arms crossed watching for him to come up the front walk. Julian realized that she’d probably stopped waiting years ago, but still he liked to imagine.
He slid his weary foot back into his shoe and stood slowly. His journey was finally over. He could tell by the brush strokes on the horizon. The gray, flat mountains sat flush against the blue sky. The painter had been careless. He’d let the gray bleed into the blue when the paint was still wet, making a swirl of sky and rock that just shouldn’t have existed.
The mountains that seemed so large and distant all of his life were smaller than him now. He reached out a timid hand and touched the stretched canvas they were painted on. The paint was rough. He felt the edges and grooves of the brush strokes against his fingertips. This was the edge of his world, but he wanted to see what was beyond. People had always told him there was nothing beyond the end, but Julian never once believed it.
He pulled the knife from his pocket and unsheathed the blade. There was only one way to find out. The blade was smaller than Julian remembered it being when he chose it.
He said the only prayer he knew, “Dear Lord, please help me succeed. Amen.” He lunged forward sticking the blade through the canvas just above the peak of the tallest mountain. He pulled the blade straight across the sky. It gave surprisingly little resistance. When he was done he examined his handy work, a gash nearly three feet long wounded the sky. That was all for a few seconds. A light brighter than anything Julian had ever seen before eased from the gash accompanied by the long creak of a rusty hinge. Julian wanted to run, but his tired legs didn’t react quickly enough. The light rushed over him pulling him into the end of time and space, making an end to him.
Photo by Chi King.