Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Three Fates
(1865)

"…I would have never bothered to create them in the first place."

As the EndDays drew closer to their end day, The Muse and I drove to the edge of our experience, the Oregon Coast. Neither of us had ever held any desire to go out on the salt. I learned that while The Muse has always been unfazed by height, depths terrify her. I do not know if I’m prone to seasickness, but I have never felt terribly moved to discover whether I might be. We cling to the edge, me finding a beach read, though the town we chose no longer holds a single bookstore, new or used. The world we’d known had been throwing off hints that it was disappearing. This missing bookstore experience seemed like just another bit of evidence. We were not precisely helpless, but more acknowledging that we were increasingly floatsom, no longer the center of anyone’s attention; hardly even our own anymore.

Anyone seeking to witness an ending pursues one of the greater paradoxes, for this world was never contained in such definitive boxes. This world smears. The news of its demise was inevitably premature. That spectacle, unavoidably incomplete. If the future arrives on little cat’s feet, the past recedes even more secretively. It slips away unseen if only because it stopped drawing any attention to itself long before it disappeared. It couldn’t ever disappear if it hadn’t already ceased appearing since nobody ever remembers when. The event cannot register because it was never an event. Quite the opposite. No whimper. No surrender. No nothing to report back home about from the edge of the shrinking continent.

The sun rose on that last morning, just as it always had. In that respect, this world hadn’t changed a lick for my lengthy investigation into its impending demise. I faced a decision. I could pass right through an end of an eternity here and simply continue seeking, or I could meekly accept that I once again spent this time pursuing phantoms. I might have learned that even my best-intended attempts to reason with this world would ultimately prove to be unreasonable. Reports of all demises arrive prematurely, as if to draw attention away from events of equal, or even greater, significance. Not to confuse consideration with ignorance, but, perhaps, simply to experience an innocence again. I usually chase after the unknowable as if I might come to know it rather than as if it might get to better know me. The latter seems much more plausible, the closer I seem to come to another resolution that reliably never comes.

It’s a negotiated settlement. Incumbents do not drop dead to any deadline or lifeline, either. Their policies do tend to ultimately tangle up each other. It’s not really a web they weave, but a tangle they eventually cannot escape from. The master self-saboteur ultimately could only stymie himself. If that changed the world, so be it. The illusions of progress work better for some than they ever do for others. Some exist to remind us that history and even futures sometimes move in reverse. Like reading a mildly interesting beach read, some pages get re-read twice as the reader dozes through their lengthening afternoon shadows. Beaches might be best seen from a distance rather than experienced while sitting on shifting sand.

EndDays. Each one began, taunting me to acknowledge the impending nothingness of a subject, almost perfect. Not quite there yet. I wrote of my aspirations more than my accomplishments, for I spent much of the excursion waiting for another inevitable to happen, as if I could not possibly achieve something until that aspiration occurred. It turned out that the aspiration was the thing I was aspiring for, delivered in the very moments I anticipated it would one day be delivered. That day was always then, that instant, not some imagined distant future. The incumbent was never anything more than the irrelevant distraction he had always been, influencing little more than the peace of mind I lent him every time.

I propose a following series, as of yet unnamed, but one that will not mention, even by odd extension, the incumbent everyone grew to despise. Do I really need to hold a reviled one in my thoughts to feel complete in this world? This world was fading when it first appeared. It should be properly fading until it ultimately disappears in an instant nobody notices because we will all be blessedly distracted by some fresh irrelevance. I do not leave cynical that I was ultimately unable to witness the end of my EndDays. These days were their own end as well as their own beginning. They ate their own tail with relish! They would ultimately foretell the following series, which would appear with the usual regularity, then grow to most likely learn the same lesson all over again again. That has always been how these series began before ending little wiser.

A wispy marine layer quietly turns pink as the sun rises near the ending of this nearly perfect Spring. The first day of summer, mere hours away, I am tired. Weary of chasing a place I will never arrive. Weary of carrying even bruised shadows of our fading incumbent’s stories. I see that I’ve arrived. I have work remaining. A final weekly writing summary to concoct. A preface, the sort always best left until last, after the author confirms that the butler actually did it again. These stories steadfastly refuse to age. They remain immediate as long as they remain. They begin, then forget they were supposed to eventually slip away. The prediction of their demise was never not premature, either, for they always embodied beginning again, every damned morning and each blesséd weekly summary. Had I intended them to go away, I would have never bothered to create them in the first place. The End.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz