The Maelstrom's Denouement by Samuel Merrin

I'll eventually add this to my site (Samuel Merrin: The Definitive Short Story Collection), but I thought I'd post it here first, just for fun. It's a heavy, heavy story of love, retribution, and the fickleness of nature.


The Maelstrom's Denouement
By Samuel Merrin

The ink dripped off the page after the rain had stopped. Somehow the pages seemed to extend the duration of the rainfall even after the sky had closed itself off, after Nature had ceased her promulgation of anger. The notebook had been dropped and forgotten, and as the water washed the words away onto the muddy ground the thoughts also lost themselves in the maelstrom's denouement.

The writer was a mystery, but some of the words remained legible. There was a story compiled there for the notebook's discoverer to decode and understand. It's possible that no one would have discovered it, if it weren't for John.

The only reason John found the notebook was because Nicole was too busy (or so she said) to see him. He couldn't define her, she always seemed distant but every once in a while she would open up, and her words would silently move him because he understood but had never before heard the ideas she was expressing. He knew instantly that they were true, that they were right, and that they were his thoughts, though he had never thought them before.

Her hair, he had always thought, was a thousand different colors, not one of them a hue he had ever found elsewhere in nature. Lots of girls he knew had chestnut tones in their hair, or amber, or chocolate, or any one of the myriad phonetic combinations that literary artists over the years had invented to say the word "brown." Nicole didn't have hair like any of them, though he couldn't put his finger on exactly how she struck him as so different. She barely let him put a finger on anything, now that he thought of it.

Sometimes he was filled with an irrestistable urge to reach across the table and grab her hand and hold it, hold it tight because he knew that this moment was as real as any he had ever experienced. The thought of her slipping away left his heart beating, quaking his ribcage with an offbeat drumline. But she had sent him away, and it wasn't the first time.

He wondered if she listened when he talked. She must know, he reasoned, that he breathed for her, that he had since that first day, back in March. Now, the rainy season had overtaken the city, and rivulets of the remnants of broken clouds ran through the cracks in the pavement. It was only now that John understood things, gazing up at the slate-colored clouds that seemed to be packing up their things to leave, at long last finished with their seasonal task. The blue crack in the sky expanded as the gray, nebulous mothballs retreated behind the mountains, out of site.

Seasons change, John mused, kicking a puddle as a whiff of cold breeze grazed the back of his neck. Seasons change and people change. But they had to change on their own, out of motivation of their own volition rather than the will of anyone else. John couldn't do anything to change her mind, even though the course of his heart was irrevocably cemented.

By the time he stumbled upon the notebook on his walk home, John had already come to a decision. He would tell Nicole how he felt, and leave. He couldn't bear to hear her answer, the one he knew was coming because he knew she didn't love him and never would. As his rubber soles suddenly tread on the waterlogged pages of the notebook, tucked invisibly under a wind-swept pile of loose leaves blown free by the cool breath of the abruptly-subsided rainstorm, he crouched down to pick up the leather-bound book.

At that moment, a fireball-meteor fell to the Earth from outer space and John exploded.