Season(')s End

By Steven Ballard

Angels and demons, from the heavens and earth, between this universe and the next, are so deeply entwined with those of us able to hear their voices. A cacophony too quiet to be heard aloud fills her soul with a screaming too loud to be told.

This is a story about a girl suffering to tell her story and finding the will to live it despite herself. Follow the increasingly unhinged mind of a typical teenager as her life unfolds catastrophically around her. Is her grief and sorrow a catalyst for schizophrenia, or is she simply growing aware of a world underlying this?

As she navigates family, loss, and young love, she stumbles upon a narrative world within her own. What is at first a curiously vivid alternate reality becomes something sinister as she is pulled in further than she knows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Ballard
• Release date: Mar 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466036895

Steven Ballard

I'm a twenty-something year-old college drop-out living in sin, though that's soon to be rectified. I was always a prolific reader of fiction growing up, tried my hat at being an English major for a while, and have written more material than I can possibly remember (or find) now; I've also started a mediocre career as an editor of fellow amateur authors, soon to be rolled out to Smashwords if everything goes well. Author bios are silly.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Tell me the story of the end of the world again. Please, Daddy? she unfutilely pleaded.

Okay, okay. So, where to begin...

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The world was virgin and new, hot from the still burning fires of its birth in the swirling rot of dead stars, tumultuous with the ires of not yet squelched rock and stone, a dark dizzy delirium serum readied for the possibilities of aeons of improbabilities. The skies were a stifling mix of smoke and ash, harsher than the harshest alcoholic womb; and forever it continued and went on until the seeds and inklings of life arose simultaneously serendipitously, of so many different types in so many different places attuned to so many different conditions.

Life changed the composition of the world and its atmosphere like a junkie stuck with too many needles until it killed itself unknowingly just by its very existence, for there was no equilibrium and no order to the chaos; and this was the first mass suicide on this still new planet. It was a senseless self-abortion of life by life for life from life. What little did not die hid itself away from the world in places it could survive barely on the edge of the scythe, for the rest of all time an unseen force within the whole equilibrium.

And again, from the not yet able to biologically decay but yet physically decomposing remains of life arose life again in the world, alike and unlike that which came before, ready for the world it lived in. It thrived and covered the world like an infection infiltrates the body of an AIDS victim suffering without an immune system to witness defend itself; it changed the world like all life inevitably will. Evitably this second life was changed by the world it changed, as it changed it was changed; and so equilibrium was forged from the chaos, through it shifted life shifted with it, and thought it changed life changed as well.

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But that isn't the story you normally tell, she interjected, confused.

Not every story only has one side or one way to be told, but no, you're right, this isn't the story of the end of the world really, or at least not the end of the end of the world, I guess.

Oh, okay.

Do you want me to continue, or tell you a different story?

After much contemplation, it seems like that story's over already, she finally said.

What do you mean?

Is there anything interesting left in the story until people show up?

How right you are, he chuckled.

Very, she answered.

Well, then, goodnight, honey.

Goodnight, she reciprocated as she leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. Tell me another story of the beginning of the end of the world tomorrow night? Or maybe just the end.

We'll see.

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**

Nothing extraordinary ever happens in the world, not really. If you think that you're special, that some exception to this rule has somehow been allowed by chance to occur just for you, you would be wrong. It, everything, was bound to happen sooner or later, and not in that everything that can happen will happen pseudo-science fiction sort of way.

You're born one day, you live a shitty life in a shitty world with shitting people falling in shitty love and hate, and then you die. It's not a depressing view of the world; at least it's not supposed to be. But everyone brings to any theory their own opinions, so it can hardly be helped.

So where does this leave us? Or more precisely, but completely in reverse, where should we begin? Let's start with Eden Taylor, the son of the daughter of two stoned hippies. That's where it all began, the movement to change the world, fix it once and for all. Well, we all know how well that went.

So the journey begins, as a hypothetical yet completely unrealistic Buddhist would say, near the beginning. At, in, on, for, from, to, around, and after are all equally horrid prepositions when discussing the beginning of existence because the beginning didn't know or care it was the beginning, and sure as hell wouldn't have considered itself a reference point from which to talk about the rest of the entirety of existence. Only a culture as egocentric as our own would do such a thing as that, not to mention personify a state of being of time. Near has been deemed, by the one that matters but must remain unacknowledged, an acceptable preposition for the discussion of the beginning of all existence.

This journey, however, begins not at the beginning but quite some time afterwards; if you must know, in roughly the year 798 according to modern, though hardly so, Christianized Democratic, though thoroughly undemocratic, Western timekeeping, or 0, depending upon if you cared or noticed or cared to notice. Of course, as finicky as our decadent, and rather biased, though uniform, timekeeping methods are, we have such a plethora of dates from which to pick in dating ourselves, as in assigning ourselves a time in relation to the rest of time: 19 billion; 3.6 million; 5,978; 798; 39. And that's just from a literal, though misunderstood and misappropriated, grasp of divine heredity, Christian or Hindu or Jewish or Muslim or Mayan or Celtic or Shinto or Catholic or otherwise, not relatively not speaking of course.

But, let's leave all that theological and political crap for later; why not get back to how Eden's mom's parents shacked up one night in 1964.

They were at a concert, taking various mild-altering drugs; it doesn't matter which concert or which drugs, though not because it actually doesn't matter, it definitely would, but because they couldn't and can't remember, from the next morning until today. Then again, why bother crying over spilt milk or forgotten memories. Blaming it on the drugs, though, is like pointing to the Jews for Hitler, pinning the Third World War on Ethel Jackson (42 N. Main St. Yakima, WA), or believing there exists a supreme being that actually cares about you. So, I'm not going to do it; besides, love is love, whether you think it's a panda or another human being.

Luckily for us, they both knew they were human; no delusions of bestiality today. There they were, sitting on the grassy hill, enjoying the music and each other, engaged in the most trivial of stoned conversations. They had only met earlier that day, so neither was sure when they noticed it, both being rather reluctant to admit falling for a near complete stranger, no matter how good looking, but they both felt it. Enjoying the conversation inevitably led to enjoying each other in a slightly more literal sense of the word, and did they ever. Being so many shades of high that it was initially rather difficult for them both to get each other’s pants off, they rather understandably didn't bother with birth control. It may as well have never been invented, though isn't that always the way of such things?

Anyways, regardless of the state of birth control in the larger patriarchal society or smaller hippie one, the story continues. They hardly rose with the dawn, but rather with dusk did they stir from slumber. Far from departing that day from the battlefield of strewn asunder corpses separately, forever never to converge again, never really knowing one another, and never finding each other, instead they left hands on hips, for better and worse. Nothing ever changes, for better or worse.

**

*

That's enough for now I think, don't you think?

Sure.

It's getting late, and you have learning to do tomorrow, he said, patting her where he imagined her knee was under the sheets.

Falling out of her reverie, she groaned. She loved the story of the end, but it always took her dad so long to tell, so many nights. It was never coherent, never a logical story. She'd come to accept that, and even liked the minor details that differed from one telling to the next.

Okay, Dad, I know. Goodnight, leaning out of bed just enough to give him a kiss on the cheek. She knew her father better than most did and far better than most know their own, but it was something she likely would not truly appreciate until later.

Smiling to himself, he softly closed the door to her room.

Chapter 2

Hey there, you ready for me to tuck you in? he asked as he sneaked into her room the next night.

Pondering for a minute, she pushed her book under the pillow and situated herself under the covers. Okay, she conceded with only the slightest hint of a pout.

What's that about?

You just got home; don't I deserve a story?

He couldn't quite make the connection for himself, but she picked that up from her mother he knew, so why argue. Alright, where'd I leave off? He sat down next to her on her bed.

Eden's grandparents had just had sex, she rattled off rather blushingly.

I half wonder whether or not you're mature enough for this story, but it's too late now. When she didn't say a word, he just started to continue.

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Anyways, Eden's mother's parents had just made love and Eve had just been conceived. So, the story of the end begins with a birth that could, if paid attention to, though it wasn't, signal the beginning of the world in the minds of some, not just the end, though those of that sort of mind always were and always will be fewest and farthest between.

However, let go to India. As many know, India has still yet to dismantle its class system that allows the nearly complete discrimination of an entire people simply because of their birth. Unfortunately, this isn't the tale of an Untouchable who becomes a prince and births a royal line; it's the story of an orphaned Untouchable adopted by a visiting American celebrity who died in a plane crash near a Buddhist monastery. By some twist of the hands of fate that boy survived, and was found in the forest by his future brother monks.

It would almost be more believable if he were the next reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the twenty-ninth. He's not now, nor was he ever. He was just a Buddhist monk, from cradle to grave. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing. In a word, he was ordinary in his obscurity, just like the rest of us; it only appears a tragedy to those who think they are beyond such mere obscenity.

There were a few peculiarities in his great long life of obscurity, and both had to do with his solemn vows. At the age of thirteen, having been with his monastic family for over three years, he went on a vision quest, not in the manner often stereotyped as Native American; whereas in the American Romantic style of aggrandized search for self he would have went to the nearest village and gotten married, in the aboriginal Australian style he would have climbed Everest alone, without a shirt, in jeans. He was none of these three; in fact, he didn't know what or who he was at all. So he, in the style perfected by a rather obscure few in history of whom he had attempted extensive study at the temple library, after having been taught to read, though not quite to write, for there exists too much power in the pen, walked for a day and a night. Coming to a tree of a particularly wide nature he sat with his back prostrate against it.

Do you know what happened ten days later? He was found by a team of loggers and taken to the local village's missionary infirmary. Feeble and frail from a frivolous fasting, weak and wary from the wanderlusted wayfaring, he would not and could not awaken for anynothing. The loggers left, the nurses continued their duties, and the few children that had followed the white men through town dispersed. For no particular reason, though, an American had stayed for a moment more, suddenly recognizing the young monk.

He wore a plain robe marked by a crest of the monastery she had been searching for. She sat and waited for him to awaken.

Now, no matter how cliché I know this may sound, the vows this monk had made, or rather would formally make upon returning from this taxing quest, were important. Sitting in front of the tree, after a time it began to whisper in his ear small subtle secrets. At length the eventual destruction and end of the world were relayed to this young monk; the weight of which was almost too much to bear, and indeed he wept. However, what he was being told by that tree over a century ago was, is, nothing compared to the truth as we ourselves are now aware and have been witness to for some time. But he was only a child, a child confronted with horrors, and he vowed then and there to that tree, to that grove, to the world, and to the entirety of existence, that he would do something. He vowed silence in order to be humble and learn from others what he himself knew not; he vowed chastity so he could more wholly serve the world without distraction; he vowed perseverance in the hopes of finding a way anyway to stop the end before it began.

She, the American college student teaching English, would help him to fulfill each of his vows even as she helped him break them all, allowing a place for the birth of Adam.

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"Let's leave that story for later; aren't