Epilogue:

Coal

Sometime Later

 

 

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

 

 

Snow

Salt Lake City, Utah

 

It was snowing now in Salt Lake City. For the first time in a few years, snow had made it to the lower elevations of the Salt Lake Valley. The street in front of them was quiet and serene. The four of them sat on the porch, reunited with their dog, Denali, the Wasatch Mountains behind them. Utah never looked quite right without snow. No. Logan or Salt Lake City or Provo or even Zion were not the same without snow on the mountains. Sure, the summers were fine, if a bit hot at times. But snow, snow was what made each place make sense, even though there was less of it each year. The state of Utah appeared naked and dry without snow, the surrounding geography hostile and contentious. Snow held everything together. It made you bundle up with a book next to a fire and a hot chocolate—that is, of course, if it was not a restriction day, due to the poor air quality caused by the inversion and pollution. But on a clear day, snow quieted the streets. Made everything look like Christmas. Made you think of carols and hot cocoa. Skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, or snowmobiling. Salt Lake City was the most beautiful city in the winter on a clear, inversion-less day. The mountains standing as triangles topped with powdered sugar. She could see it in her mind. Logan now, too, was beautiful. Becca felt complete peace with her surroundings, winter right around the corner.

Her mom was steadily recovering, on a few different medications for physical and mental rehabilitation. Emily would actually go visit her once a week now, and she’d told Lee and Becca that the forty-five-minute drive from Sugarhouse to Provo and subsequent visit were Emily’s highpoints of the week. Rebecca and Emily were becoming fast friends, bonding over (among many other things) the misogyny and exclusion of women from religious structures. Lee was almost done with the semester, Becca hadn’t drank in over a month, and Analise was growing beautifully as each day brought on some new joy, some new holy terror, but she was now the highlight of Becca’s life.

And it was good. Now the world could end.

In the same moment, as this thought flitted through her head, however, Becca felt a burst of wind whip down the street out of the north. Her spine shivered. She turned to Lee and Analise and suddenly felt a rumble beneath her feet, a cracking in the distance, like the low roar of thunder several miles off, the sound an iceberg used to make when it split and crashed into the melting, arctic blue Alaskan ocean.

For a second, she thought it might just be her stomach, a migraine perhaps, but then she looked at Lee, who was holding Analise close, and his eyes were also wide open, his ears almost twitching, forward facing, like their Denali’s—alert and anxious.

Lee stood up with Analise—staring directly at Becca and then looking around with a face full of worry. Becca stood up too, their eyes met and their hands moved together magnetically, fingers interlocking; birds scattered from the tops of trees directly overhead them. All of a sudden, everything got very still, and there were no human, animal, or meteorological movements. As suddenly as the wind came thrashing down upon them, it left, as if the earth had taken one last exhale before death. No cars, no humans, no wind.

Now it was so quiet, so quiet not even a leaf moved, so quiet and still, no sounds, no movement that Becca felt as if she was once again plunging her head beneath the cold blue waters of the reservoir.

All of a sudden, Becca knew, the answer, to all her questions, to the meaning of life in general; it was one word, ha, she laughed, one word—the answer to all her questions and the earth and God and the universe’s response to humanity—it was all the same, and the answer, the word? The word was mercy, that was it.

And just like that, the volcanic ash began to fall.

 

 

The End