Breathless

Below is a short story without a title. It was written to be read aloud, preferably by someone with a largish lung-capacity. It was inspired by the picture which precedes it, and so in a rather heavy- handed manner clocks in at exactly 1000 words.

The chances of fossilisation are ridiculously small, especially for a land dwelling mammal. Without a convenient pool of soft sediment to keel over and die in there is a greater than 99% chance that you will just dissolve down into nothingness within a few millennia. Normally nothing of our physical selves will remain for any future generations to find. I run this by Fizel and he thinks for a minute and then says: tough shit and I just glare at him because I’ve made it clear that I’m only half way through a monologue and this is the kind of remark that might stop a lesser raconteur stone dead. I rack up the glare to say ‘tough shit to you too’ and carry on with the story because I’m about to sell Fizel a ten bag and if he wants my drugs he can damn well wait until I’ve finished talking. I run over the basic process of fossilization and explain how in special cases large collections of bones can become fossilized after some catastrophic event like Pompeii or maybe the Burgess shale although of course he doesn’t have a clue what either of these things are. I make sure it’s all laid out before I reach the point- so how do you think civilization is going to end? He thinks again, his bushy eyebrows knitting together and for a second I think he’s going to bring out some religious story because he’s an on-again off-again Muslim and likes to drop it into conversation when he’s more on than off and I don’t really have a problem with that but it’s going to be another massive stumbling block for my rapidly developing narrative and I don’t want to have to manoeuvre around his religious beliefs just to finish a story I’m starting to lose interest in anyway but eventually he shrugs and just says: war, and I nod and smile and say: exactly. If human civilization eventually ends it’s going to be through some catastrophic event - nuclear destruction, a self-sustaining rapid climate shift, some kind of devastating retro virus. We’re all going to go at the same time, geologically speaking, so for one thing that’s a greater number of bodies hitting the ground at the same time - means more bones. Also there’s probably going to be some kind of disaster effect like at Pompeii that means more bones are going to be preserved, nuclear winter for instance: all those people die choking in radioactive ash, like those savages on the Bikini atolls. That’d do for a layer of soft sediment, and everything else is dying at the same time so you’ve got ground cover and no cycle of decomposition, not to mention all the people that would shuffle off in sealed environments that have never existed before now so the estimates could go up hugely! It doesn’t have to be a massive increase, there’s enough of us around and that number is only going to increase in the near future so if it goes up as high as say a percent that’s still what? I get the calculator on my phone because I haven’t got a clue and I can’t remember how many noughts there are in a billion anyway but I say with triumph 60 million and spread my arms. So loads of us will make it into the fossil record- it could be you or me if the world ends soon enough and when some wise alien species excavates our ravaged globe it could be us they dig up and put in glass boxes for their children to look at. Fizel waits for a sufficient time to pass to make it look like he’s actually considered this and then says ‘sound’ and looks expectantly at me and I sigh and say fine and motion for him to give me the tenner and then I gulp down the last of my pint and indicated the plastic tobacco poach that has sat between us all this time and he grins and puts it in the pocket of his stupid puffer coat that makes him look like a drug dealer then he makes some excuse and gets up to leave and surprises me by turning around before he’s taken two steps and says wouldn’t it be funny if we got fossilized together and the aliens would wonder what the fuck we were about and come up with some history shit even though all we were doing is shotting weed and I smile and say it’s a nice thought already wishing he’d get out of my hair. And then on the bus later I think about what he said and think that he’s probably right, how when the end comes most of us will be at work or sat on buses like I am and the people pressed into the fossil record next to us will probably be total strangers and anyone who finds us will perhaps never suspect as much. Then I catch the scent of the girl sat in front and it doesn’t smell of anything specific, not coconut or flowers just the way girls smell when their hair is clean. Then when I get home the front door is open and the whole place stinks of cigarettes and Mattie is sat in front of the television in his school uniform looking bored because you’ve forgotten to take him to school and when I ask him if he’s hungry he leaps right up so you’ve obviously forgotten to feed him and that he can’t reach into the fridge by himself and it takes me a while to find you because you’re always in the last room I check and this time it’s mine and you don’t even hide the fact that you’ve been going through my stuff for funds and I think of the girl on the bus and how her hair smelled and I think that there are worse things than being fossilized next to total strangers.