the very, very rough, very, very end of my novella:

....

He dreams of being carried through tiers of leaves by a girl who is white as a hot poker, but not at all dead. She ties him to the limbs, pressing the pale white-pink of her mouth to the bulging moon that tries to push itself out from the center of his chest and the center of each, closed eye.

o

Andrew died and the rifts, where there were roots of tugging plants, communicated between the smoke and the moon (which had departed) telling Andrew,

you are alive, after all.

To which he had nothing to add.


The universe and everything in it was suddenly gone. The ending of the universe was not methodical. It was not a judgment, no hand of God: only a descending loneliness that pulled everything apart, took every particle and pulled each one so far away from every other that the resulting ache became the cry to announce
the end.