The Last Long Afternoon

The letter that ended the world came on a Tuesday, in an envelope the color of weak tea, and Nell Aster read it twice before she let herself put the kettle on.

She read it a third time while the water climbed toward its boil, standing at the tall window of the little station on Sorrel Hill where she had measured the sun every morning for forty-one years. Below her, Ember Hollow lay in its green bowl of a valley — the white steeple, the water tower with the town's name gone soft and pink from the weather, the long main street where the shopkeepers were rolling in their awnings for the evening. A boy rode his bicycle in slow figure-eights outside the pharmacy, in no hurry to be anywhere at all, the way only a child in the last week of summer can be in no hurry.

The letter did not raise its voice. That was the cruelty in it. It spoke in the flat gray manner of the Bureau, of revised coefficients and a curve that had bent, quietly and without apology, in the wrong direction. The sun was going out. Not in the ten thousand years the schoolbooks promised, not in some far cathedral of time where no living face would ever have to watch it happen. Sooner. A handful of winters, each longer than the one before it, and then a winter that forgot how to end.

*You are instructed,* the letter said near the bottom, *to continue issuing the standard daily bulletin. Public disclosure is not authorized at this time. The Bureau is grateful for your discretion.*

Nell folded the paper along its creases, the way you fold something you intend to keep, and made her tea, and carried the cup out onto the iron balcony that circled the dome. The evening was coming on gold. It was always gold, this hour, in this season — the light lying down long across the fields, turning the ordinary hay into something a painter would give a hand to catch. She had watched forty-one years of these evenings and had never once thought to be grateful for them, the way you are never grateful for your own heartbeat until a doctor puts a cool hand on your wrist and goes quiet.

She thought about the telephone in the office. It would take four words. *The sun is dying.* The line ran down the hill and into every kitchen in the Hollow, and by full dark the whole valley would know, and by morning the roads out would be a river of headlights, and the boy on the bicycle would learn a thing no boy should carry, and carry it for whatever was left.

And it would change nothing. That was the part the Bureau, in its gray wisdom, had gotten right and for the wrong reasons. No headlight-river reached far enough. No road climbed up out of the season that was coming. There was no colder, farther town to flee to; the whole turning world was the town, and the porch lights of it were going out.

So the question was not whether to tell them. The question was what to give them, in the little that was left.

Nell set down her cup. She went, stiff in the knees, down the spiral stair to the base of the dome, to the wooden press where the old things were kept, and she found what she was looking for under a drift of folded star-charts: the striker for the station bell, and the great brass key to the arc lamp.

Once, long ago, Ember Hollow had held an equinox festival on the hill. The station would ring its bell across the valley at dusk and throw its white arc lamp up against the belly of the clouds, a second smaller sun for one night, and the town would climb the road with lanterns and blankets and cold chicken and children already half asleep, and they would lie in the grass and watch the made light and the real stars share the same sky. They had stopped, the way towns stop things — a wet year, a hard year, a year when the man who organized it moved away — and no one had ever quite decided to begin again.

She rang the bell.

It was a sound she had forgotten her arms remembered. It went out over the roofs and the water tower and the figure-eights, one long bronze note and then another, rolling down into the bowl of the valley and coming back up changed, softened, mixed with dogs and screen doors and a mother's voice calling a name. She rang it until her shoulders ached, and then she climbed to the lamp and turned the brass key, and the old arc caught with a smell of storm and struck its white column straight up into the gathering dusk.

From the balcony she watched them come. First the boy, of course, standing up on his pedals, and then the porch lights answering one by one down the length of the main street, and then the doors, and then the lanterns strung out along the hill road like a necklace laid down in the dark. They were laughing as they climbed. Word had gone ahead of them — *the old festival, she's brought back the old festival* — and they came in shirtsleeves with blankets over their shoulders and babies on their hips, and a boy's bicycle lay abandoned, shining, on its side in the grass.

She did not tell them.

She told them, instead, that it was the anniversary of the station — which was a lie, or near enough to one, and the kindest thing her mouth had ever made. She told them there would be a festival every year now, that she had been foolish to let it lapse, that she was an old woman making up for lost time. They cheered her, these people she had measured mornings above for four decades and hardly known, and someone had brought a fiddle, and someone else lemonade gone warm and sweet, and the children ran through the made light and the real starlight with their arms out like small aircraft, casting two shadows each, a soft one and a sharp one, and not one of them looked up to wonder which sun was which.

Later, when the fiddle had wound down and the smallest ones were carried home asleep, Nell went alone into the office. She wrote the truth out plainly, everything the letter had said, in her own steady hand. She did not soften it and she did not send it. She folded the pages with the Bureau's letter inside them, and she sealed them in the tin box that had lain in the station's cornerstone since the day the dome was raised, for whoever came after — a year from now, or ten, or however many gold evenings the sun had left to spend. Let them find it cold. Let them find it and know that someone had known, and had chosen, on one particular warm night, to give the living the thing the dying always want most and ask for least: an ordinary evening, and no shadow on it but the two the children made, running.

Then she put out the arc lamp, so as not to waste it, and sat a while in the dark that was only the usual dark, the good and temporary dark, and finished her tea, and did not turn on the light.