THE ENDING

Justine Barlow was a runner. She wore sweat suits. She drank Gatorade. Every morning, when her cuckoo clock cheeped six times, she got up, got out of the house, clipped a Walkman to her waistband, stretched against a tree, hopped in place a few times, and then set off into her neighborhood.

It cleared her head. It kept her heart healthy, which was important because hers was a good heart. She gave money to the homeless, even when they weren’t begging. She said “Good morning” to people and meant it.

Why not? Mornings were good. Cold mornings, rainy ones. It didn’t matter. They were new beginnings. Justine had recently graduated from college, was living on her own for the first time, and had her entire life ahead of her. “Each day is a blank page,” she told people. “A fresh thing to write on. Have fun with it.”

Running was hard work, but it was fun too. The sounds—the barks, beeps, and buzzes—always entertained and they were never the same, even if her route was, a four-mile loop that passed by the school and the reservoir, through the center of town and back home past the rickety old houses on Palmer Street. The images were always different too. The trees that went from green to brown to white to pink to green, depending on the season. The babies who went from slings to strollers to feet to bikes. Change. Beauty. Life. All that crap.

And death. That came later.

It started with one baby bird, clear-feathered and dead on the sidewalk beneath an oak tree. Poor little thing must have fallen from her nest, Justine thought. She even considered burying it, giving it a proper funeral, but she knew that wasn’t how nature was supposed to work. A stray cat or raccoon would eat it and poop it out, and then the poop would become dirt and plants would grow from the poop and other birds would eat the plants. This was called the circle of life.

So the next morning, when she saw two dead birds on the sidewalk, she thought, Poor little things, and she ran on.

The next morning she saw four. Poor little things. The cats and raccoons were going to be plump as can be.

It kept doubling, though. Eight the next day. Then sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four dead birds by the end of the week, all along the same running route.

Justine was disturbed. “Have you noticed a lot of dead birds lately?” she asked her friend Laura.

“Always see some in the spring,” Laura said. “It’s a shame. The world is a tough place.”

“How many have you seen this spring?” Justine asked.

“I don’t know. Normal amount, I guess. I haven’t counted.”

Justine had been counting. She had started by keeping tabs in her head, but now she put little check marks in a pocket notebook as she ran.

One hundred and twenty-eight baby birds the next day. Two hundred and fifty-six the next.

Was this an omen of something worse to come? How could other people not be noticing? She asked around. “What’s with the birds?”

People would reply by looking into the cloudless sky and shrugging.

The birds weren’t imaginary. They were flesh and blood. Cold flesh and cold blood, that is. Justine knew because she poked them with her finger. There weren’t enough cats and raccoons to possibly eat them all, so she started scooping the bodies up in plastic grocery bags like little logs of dog poop. Or at least that’s what it looked like to her neighbors.

“You probably have yourself one of those Great Danes,” a postman joked as Justine jogged past with two sagging plastic bags.

Strange thing to say, Justine thought. If that’s the case, then where’s the dog? I don’t just run around scooping poop. No sir. This is death. Something serious is afoot.

“Aren’t you worried?” Justine asked him. It wasn’t the type of question she normally posed. For her entire life up until that point, she believed in a world without worry.

“Worried about what?” the postman asked.

“All the death.”

He too looked up at the sky, but he kissed his fingers. “Our time comes when our time comes,” he said, and returned to his route.

Justine returned to her route, but she couldn’t run anymore. Too many birds to pick up. When she made it home, she buried them all in a hole in her backyard as a suspicious neighbor boy watched from a perch in a tree house.

“It’ll be okay,” she assured him, but he didn’t respond. Maybe it was the wobble in her voice, the tone that said it would, in fact, not be okay, that it was actually going to be pretty damn horrible.

Because Justine could do the math: 512; 1,024; 2,048; 4,096; 8,192. That was just one more week’s worth if it kept doubling, and she was sure it would. It meant in two more weeks there would be a billion dead birds. A month after that? She couldn’t fathom such a number. Enough to cover the entire earth, she suspected. It seemed biblical. Beyond biblical.

She locked herself in the house. She started making phone calls. The police, senators’ offices, her parents.

“What will we do to stop it?” she asked.

They all laughed her off. “You’re too sensitive,” her father said. “Heck, your mother’s cat alone probably kills one hundred birds a year. These things have a way of balancing themselves out.”

Two weeks before, she would have agreed. Two weeks before, she wouldn’t have boarded up her windows. But that’s what she did now.

The next day, the birds started showing up in her house. In the toilet, down the chimney, in the air-conditioning ducts. The numbers held true. She ticked them off in her notebook and filled the bathtub with the bodies.

There would be no more running. Mornings weren’t good anymore. There was only the inevitable sunrise and the inevitable double dose of dead baby birds. Within a few days the bathroom was full. Justine didn’t dare look out her windows. Not because she feared seeing more dead birds outside, but because she feared seeing none.

She was the problem. She was the cause of all this. They followed her. Was this punishment for her positivity? Or was she simply going crazy? Whatever the case, she couldn’t face the world anymore. Each day was definitely not a blank page. It was a black page. And it didn’t matter what you wrote on it; it would always be black.

Within five more days, the birds filled the house. There was nowhere to stand, to eat, to sleep. Justine huddled in the corner, surrounded by the stinking mess.

I can’t do it, she thought. I can’t go on like this.

But before she could act on her dark thoughts, something came out of the pile of death. A bird, a real live hummingbird. It hovered in front of her face.

“What does it all mean?” she asked the hummingbird.

The hummingbird didn’t say anything because hummingbirds can’t talk, obviously. Though she swore it had compassion in its eyes. The hummingbird hovered there for what seemed like hours. Then it fell dead on top of the pile, as Justine’s cuckoo clock, buried by birds, tried in vain to announce a new day.

The End?