What Remains After the World Has Ceased to Be

by Athena Dixon

Nina dreamed of alleys and dogs. Big, brindled dogs and narrow pathways with freshly turned dirt attached themselves to the tail end of her sleep and when she woke, they were still clinging at the edges of her vision. She could still smell the dust in the air and it made the back of her throat ache. The water she swallowed in trembling gulps from her bedside glass felt like mud going down. She nearly choked trying to quench her thirst, her eyes felt scratched and raw. But she was used to it. Maybe not the dream, but she was used to hurting when she woke. From a body twisted and contorted into whatever slip of safe space she could find to rest her eyes. And that’s what it was. Rest. Not sleep. Nina hadn’t known slumber in months. Maybe years if the way her back and hips stayed knotted whether the sun and moon were high or low. 

The dream. Standing on the porch of a clapboard house, she had memorized the knots in the greyed wood until at the railing appeared a dog. Its mouth curled back so far she could only make out the thinnest line of black lips. She was frightened. Terrified, in fact, that the dog would rise on its haunches and scale the two-board railing separating her from the open space of the alley. In the dream, her fingers gripped the horizon of the wood until her palms felt arthritic. When she let go, there’d been a patchwork of welts and splinters covering her skin. The dog had remained rooted in place, its growl coming from deep within its body. Had she the wherewithal, she would have backed away step by step until she was sheltered in the shotgun house.

Instead, just as the dog remained in stasis, so did she. Each of them wandered with eyes, searching up and down the alley until the dog’s growls stopped. And then she noticed there was nothing. No other voices. No other barks. No buzz of electric things or power moving in the wires overhead. Just silence bounding out over the land she could not see. And there was nowhere for either of them to go.

She knew that, too. The dream landscape wasn’t barren, but it was empty. Hollowed out like some great hand had descended from the sky and scooped out every living thing and left the shell of what they used to be behind. 

The sky was furiously golden, like all of the light in the world was concentrated on a single spot and at the edge the faintest of blue like the oceans Nina knew were now shallow enough that nothing really lived there. 

Noting the dog’s eyes followed hers to the horizon and back, the fear left her. She knew what the growl was–a warning without much teeth. She’d made her own noise. Can rattle. Breaking glass. Heavy thump of metal pipe against brick. Just to announce to the world she was still alive and intended to stay that way. Warning the world, or what remained of it, that she still stood. 

“Come,” she’d beckoned the dog and watched its ear perk. And come it did. It sidled up next to her, its wiry fur rubbing against her fingers like a breeze before they took the first step. 

So they walked together.  Haunch to hip in duo until the alley ended in the mouth of the gold coin sun. The dog bounding off into the distance so far she could no longer see it but she knew, just like she knew all that came before, it was seeking out danger before it could find her. That it was brave enough to go into the great nothing before them just as much as she was brave enough to stay right where she was–on the edge of a dream, just on the edge of waking, just at the cusp of everything and nothing.