Contrary to popular belief, the world is flat. Or, at least, my world is. Actually, my world is a lot like your world in a lot of ways. We’ve got cities, suburbs, schools, parks, theaters, arenas, everything. We’re teeming with life and culture and rampant consumerism, just like you are. But see, in my world, if you drive out of town and take a left onto the turnpike and drive until the stars come out, eventually you’ll hit the end of the world and you and your car will drive straight into nothingness. Insurance doesn’t cover that. However, incidents like these are why we have the PBCS - the Public Border Control Service. They pay for flashy neon signs that alert the general public to their distance from the end of the world. They’ve also started putting up casinos and hotels out there, with big picture windows and tacky names like The Last Resort. I don’t like them too much, myself. They make me uneasy, all those big glass buildings perched so precariously on the edge of everything. When I’m seeing them from afar, I can close one eye and stick out my hand and the colossal buildings become merely the size of my thumb. I imagine how one quick push of my palm could send the whole metropolis tumbling down...

Sorry, I’m getting off track.


I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that among all this wild, gaudy tourism, there’s a piece of the border that the PBCS has never touched. It’s true. It’s all empty out there. It’s like a desert, a wasteland, a no-man’s land. It’s flat and rocky and infinity-wide. You can see the cities, twinkling like eyes, hundreds of miles away. It seems to me like it’s perpetually nighttime out there, so bleak and empty that the sun has altogether given up on it. You travel by the maps of the stars and the ghostly glow of the moon. You fix your eyes on its open mouth, whether it be a cheshire-cat grin or a wide, shocked circle, and you walk towards it as though you wish for it to swallow you whole. But before you can be consumed, you will come, of course, to the end of this abandoned puzzle piece of time and space. Your toes will dangle out over blackness. You will probably kick a rock over the edge to watch it fall. You’ll probably take a good, long look around. And while you’re doing that, you’ll probably notice a very peculiar little house, sitting all by its lonesome, looking rather out of place, as if it had been arbitrarily dropped by a passing bird who had grown tired of carrying its weight.

But this little house isn’t arbitrary at all. In fact, it plays a very important role in this story. It’s not even so much of a house as it is a shack, really, akin to the size of a small garden shed. It is painted a dark, rusty red, with a dirt-brown roof in desperate need of repair. There is exactly one door and one window. It makes you feel a bit melancholy just to look at it, honestly.

You’re probably now wondering what exactly this silly little shack is doing all the way out there, so close to the edge and the silence and the open jaws of the moon. Let’s see if I can explain it to you.

There’s a man who spends all of his days and nights inside that shack. He’s old, I think, though not ancient. His face is worn and creased, he’s got fault lines in his forehead and fracture cracks around the corners of his lips. His coloring is like the pieces of the sky above his shack, hair silver and face white and blemished, like the surface of the moon, eyes dark but flashing, like the first appearance of stars in the night sky.

Actually, come to think of it, that’s about all I can describe. I can’t tell you anything about his physique, or the way he moves, or the clothes he wears. I’ve only ever seen him from the collarbone up, through the window.

Oh right, the window. I forgot to mention.

You remember that I told you that this shack has only one window? Well, it’s not really an ordinary house window. It’s not for decoration, and it’s not even really for viewing the world. It’s really for business transactions, like a ticket window. Yeah, like a ticket window. It’s even got a little slot at the bottom.

So this guy, he runs a full-fledged, if quiet, business out here in the void. But it’s not really like most other edge-of-the-world businesses. He doesn’t sell tickets for a stargazing tour, or for bungee jumps to the Great Below and back. He sells, to put it in very simple terms, a one-way ticket out of here.

You see, as long as there is human life, there will be choices and conflicts and mistakes, and as a result, there will be very sad people. Now, in my world, it didn’t take these very sad people very long to realize that there was a better escape route than guns and sleeping pills and nooses. It was quite simple, really, they’d chuckle morbidly to themselves. They could just walk right off the face of the world!

And that’s exactly what they did.

So there were sad, lonely people walking out of the world. And there was a man in a rusty red shack who would give them the permission -that somehow they felt they still needed- to do it.

And this is where our story really begins. It begins with this man, in this shack, in this very strange, empty corner of this very strange, empty world.














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The hooded figure on the other side of the glass slipped a small bundle through the open slot with long, slender fingers. The man inside the shack received it gently, probing it for a second with the pads of his thumbs before setting it down. He turned his head up to the waiting person outside, his inky eyes blinking against the warm glow of the single lightbulb that illuminated the inside of the shack. He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. The hooded figure turned and walked away. The man inside the shack turned his body to watch out the window. The hooded figure stopped, stared, and turned around, his back facing oblivion. With arms outstretched, shaking softly like the wings of a cautious butterfly, his body tipped backwards. It took an eternity and a millisecond both. The lines of the body were suspended in time, and then gone. The man inside the shack chuckled to himself. Some people were very dramatic. Everyone wanted to be an individual, suddenly, on their way out. He had seen it all.

He had seen business men in suits pull nervously at their ties, their hands shaking. He had seen soldiers, with scars on their faces and the perils of battles fought and lost in their eyes. Young and old alike, they had come to him. Teenagers had come, avoiding his eyes and picking nervously at their cuticles.

His memories collect. He remembers a young girl, clutching her arms over her bulging stomach. Her eyes were full of pain, in her misery they seemed to glow a dampened violet. Her dark hair clung to her hot, sticky face. She had handed him two parcels. He remembered thinking they were they two heaviest parcels he had ever been given.

All those people...and he has watched every last one of them depart. In his greedy human curiosity, he cannot bring himself to look away. Some jump. Some walk. Some take running starts. Some sit on the edge and push off gently, as if they were entering into a chilled swimming pool. Some whisper last words. Some pray. Some salute. The man in the shack has even heard the soft, sweet melody of a lullaby waft into his ears like a sweet perfume. Some cry. Their sobs are cataclysmic, and they pierce the lonely atmosphere as the sound waves radiate and pulse through the night. All those people, the man thinks. They try so hard to achieve uniquity in their last moments on this planet, they try to leave one last footprint. But there’s always another, and another, and the footprints start to lose their shape, they become unified, with one set of toes, one arch, one heel, for God knows how many souls.

Sometimes, the man in the shack thinks, these people don’t seem real at all. They are shadows, souls without bodies, without weight or life to hold them down. They are corporeal for only a few seconds, when the light from inside the shack ignites their faces. Only then can the man take in their shapes. Heavy-lidded eyes, long eyelashes, flushed, damp cheeks, stuck-out ears, teeth biting crack lips, the features announce themselves, real and certain. But then the people hand over their parcel, and they step out of the light. Their edges blur and they move from solid to liquid to ghost.


Many years pass, and the man in the shack remains. For him, it is always the same. The people come and they go, and the parcels pile up. It is always the same.

Until it is not.

The sameness shatters with a voice in the darkness. The man in the shack is so startled, his heart skips several beats. His gaze shoots up to the window, a reflex. There is no one there. But the voice comes again.

“Hello?”

No one has ever spoken to the man in the shack. And in turn, he has never spoken to anyone who has come to him. Words cannot change a thing, they do not mean much at the end of the world. But now, the man opens his mouth tentatively.

“Who’s there?”

The sound of his own voice shocks him. He is surprised that it has not simply atrophied away from years of disuse. A reply comes quickly.

“I’m here, of course.”

The man narrows his eyes and peers out the window at his new conversation partner. A child sits alone on the edge of the world. His legs kick furiously. He looks to be about eight or nine, judging by his small stature. His hands grip the ground and only his profile is visible.

“What are you doing here?”
“Just looking.”

It is a simple answer to a simple question. Even so, it puzzles the man in the shack. He watches the boy.

“Do they all go somewhere?” The question bursts forth from the small body. “Is there an island down below, where all those people go when they leave?”

It stuns the man in the shack. He has allowed himself to entertain thoughts of where these people might come from, but never ideas as to where they might go. He wonders now why that is. Maybe it is because there is no answer. After all, they never come back to tell of their travels. Do they find each other somewhere down there? Are they crushed by the magnitude of the universe? Do they simply cease to exist?

“I don’t know.” His mind creates the thought, but his vocal chords steal it, and his mouth pushes it out towards the ears of the boy. But the boy shakes his head, dissatisfied. His curiosity unappeased, he tries again.

“What’s in the parcels they bring you?”

At this, the man in the shack smiles. “Why don’t you find the givers yourself and ask them?” But as soon as he says it, he regrets it. He sees the boys face change. Even in the dark, the man in the shack can make out the frown, he can see the small body tense up.

“It’s scary down there. Like a monster.”

The man thinks, like a monster indeed. It’s great jaws were always waiting. It’s eyes were the stars, tantalizing, hypnotizing...

“Why do you stay?” asks the boy. The voice quivers just the tiniest bit.

The questions bounce and ricochet off the walls of the older mans skull. The boys voice, echoing endlessly. Why? Why? The man cannot find an answer. He could leave them, tear down the shack and return to the city. But he stays, year after year, ghost after ghost after ghost. But why? The word drones on inside his head. Their faces flip through his mind like a shuffled deck of cards, the aces, the spades, the lonely, the forgotten. He puts his hands over his ears, his eyes. The logic left in his mind cries, Stop, stop! You have your purpose here, you are safe, you are okay...but these words are drowned out by the ocean of Why, drenching his mind in panic. The man picks up his head to look at the boy again, to lash out at him for causing such great distress. But the boy is gone. The man in the shack looks out at the vacant edge of the world. He is struck by an intense wave of nausea. He pivots on his heel, throws open the door of the shack, and dry-heaves facing the ground. He breathes hard. He closes the door.

And from a great distance away, the boy watches the light in the shack go out.














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I only asked him three questions. I was foolish, curious, naive. But I never saw the light in the shack go back on.

After many years, I returned once to that ledge. I sat, and I kicked my legs, staring out into nothing. I looked over at the shack. Something snapped in me then, and I got up and began to walk towards it like a man possessed. I grasped the smooth, cold doorknob. I twisted it. There was a faint click, and I pushed the door open. The air inside the shack was warm and smelled of skin, as though heated by a human presence. My hands fumbled until they found the beaded cord attached to the lightbulb still fixed in the ceiling. I tugged, and the little room came alive.

The floor was littered with brown wrapping paper and worms of twine. The ceiling was leaking a strange substance, it dripped onto the floor and eroded the wrapping paper like so many acidic tears. But where I had expected there to be bland eggshell walls, there was an eruption of color. Almost every inch of the place was covered. There were photographs, letters, drawings, trinkets, toys. I moved slowly to the wall with the window and touched my fingers to a few of the talismans. I touched a love letter, half finished. I touched a photograph of a young woman dancing on a beach. My fingers moved and felt and sighed upon a dried sunflower, a lieutenants badge, a pair of violet baby shoes.

I cannot tell you how long I stood there, in the shack. I wanted to see everything that he had saved, all those things that had been saved from all those people that hadn’t. I wanted to absorb them, bring them back, hear their laughter and their laments. I wanted to hear their reasons. Why, I wondered, why? It was too much. I grabbed the cord of the lightbulb.

Why?

And the shack at the end of the world went dark.