Excerpt: The End

The beginning of the end came in a very insignificant way. It began with the cleaning out of Felicia's grandmother's house. Her grandmother, known to her always as Nana, had moved to a retirement home and finally had agreed that it was time to sell the home she had owned for Felicia's entire life. It was a sentimental journey in a way for the young woman, as she knew that she would never see the house again after this visit. They had been working on the house for two days, and it had been a combination of frustration, amusement and sadness. Felicia and her mother worked very well together, and they found themselves throwing out items that anyone else would have thrown away years before. This third day, they were tackling the kitchen. Felicia’s mom had done some in the kitchen prior to her daughter's arrival from Virginia, where she was attending college. She had always wanted to live somewhere besides Texas, and had gotten her wish when she had applied and been accepted to the College of William and Mary. She loved her new state, as it was so beautiful. She really didn't miss Texas at all, except for her family and a few friends. Now she sighed a bit as she sat down in the floor by the kitchen sink and began digging out the items sitting there.

Felicia began by pulling out a container of some very old dishwashing liquid that appeared to have changed colors at least twice. “Wow. . .” she sighed, holding it up to show her mother. “I think this has become an alien substance of some sort.” Her mother snorted with laughter. They could always make each other laugh in pretty much any situation. Her family had always been that way. She still missed her dad a lot, as it had been even more so when he was living. He had been gone for six years now, and not a day went by that she didn't think of him. She realized that she had stopped working for several minutes when her mom said “Sweetie, you okay?” Giving herself a mental shake, Felicia nodded and smiled at her mom. “Yep, fine. Just thinking for a minute.” “Well, don't hurt yourself there. I think I smelled hair burning.” Her mom grinned at her, and Felicia stuck her tongue out and then pulled out the next item. She stared at the extremely old container in her hand. She didn't even think this particular cleaning product had been on store shelves in years. “Do they even make this any more?” she asked her mother incredulously, and the response was a shrug. “I'm not certain. I can't say I remember seeing it anywhere any time recently.” Felicia resolved to do an internet search when she got the next opportunity to assuage her curiosity.

They continued on with their cleaning, stopping to make comments about certain items of undetermined age. Felicia was usually the one making some snappy remark, but occasionally her mother would throw one in as well. Anything that was not worth saving, which was a good part of what they found, went into trash bags. At the end of that day, half Nana’s front yard was covered in green plastic lumps, filled to the brim. “Thank goodness tomorrow’s trash day,” Felicia’s mother said, rubbing the small of her back and sighing. “Let’s go clean up and get some dinner. I think we’ve definitely earned it.” They drove away without a backwards glance. As the trash bags sat there overnight, the weight of the items in one particular bag caused a miniscule crack to appear in the container of the old cleaning substance. As the container was not full, nothing happened immediately, but in the morning when the trash truck came, while Felicia and her mother were still sound asleep from their previous day’s labors, the pressure from the other bags of trash in the truck widened the crack a bit more. The containers holding the dishwashing liquid and a few other well-aged items also began to give way, and slowly the noxious substances began to mix together. The bouncing of the trash truck served well in aiding with this. By the time the bags of garbage had been hauled to the dump, the mixture had formed a new substance entirely; something that had never existed on this earth before.