An End by Paul Hughes

could already feel the bridge gelatin dissipating into his atmosphere, clogging his body and mind. Schools of firefly machines swarmed around his face, but they seemed to be just as confused and resigned to death as Windham was.
    “Commander?”
    Windham pressed his hands to the broken phase before him. Dark streams of bridge gelatin were now virtually pouring into his bubble. Each liquid inhalation choked him; each exhalation burned. Through the hull, he saw the hunters regrouping, their scattered firework formation solidifying as they found the Teller on scope.
    “Enemy fleet in pursuit. Orders, Commander?”
    He tried to remain calm, bracing himself for the moment that he had anticipated for years. Cessation. No afterlife, no redemption, nothing. They started then, the images of his wife, his son, his beautiful family that he had left behind. He was beginning to hyperventilate, but the fireflies were now floating dead in the corrupted bubble.
    “Eject my bubble upon collapse and get out of here.”
    “Commander, I—”
    “Just do it. You have to get word to home. They have to know what we found out here.”
    He could hear it, the collapse, when it began: a faint crinkling sound of ice plunged into a tepid drink, the spidery latticework of his end, the disorienting influx of tons of bridge gelatin, displacing the bubble’s atmosphere almost immediately, but not fast enough to displace those final thoughts, that resignation to nothing, that pang of love for his Helen, that broken heart for his people and his time and everything and and crushing suffocating burning torrent rage of sound and fury pressing in and through and white world didn’t fade to black but fell into white and
     
     
    more wine?”
    “Mmmmph,” she muttered as she turned over in bed, pushing aside proletariat sheets and exposing pert young breasts that were not yet distorted by the birth and suckling of his bastard son. Her hand moved down her front, fingertips absently tracing between her breasts as she rolled on to her back and looked up at the water-stained ceiling.
    “Jemie?”
    “Hmm?” He was behind the easel, painting something again. The sudden inspiration had nearly interrupted their lovemaking, or perhaps it was just fucking, but regardless, she suspected that the possibility of female orgasm, or even remote satisfaction, had again become secondary to her lover’s obsession with his oils and brushes and canvas.
    “Do you love me?”
    Gently, daintily, he applied white to the canvas. Little dabs of pigment, or lack thereof, smoothed, roughed by the brush’s bristles.
    “Hmm.”
    The room smelled of sex and turpentine and Paris in the summer: sweat and cheap parfum and wine. He poured another glass as he sat back and surveyed his work.
    “Needs more white.”
    “Jemie, answer me!”
    He frowned, turned his attention to his mistress, now sitting up in bed. She is just a child , he thought, but her breasts and the unmistakable vice of her thighs begged otherwise.
    “Don’t call me that, Jo.”
    He turned back to his canvas. Jo harrumped and covered her body with the sheets again. No need to give this artiste a free view of her sex.
    “You son of a bitch, James!”
    Again, he glared at her.
    “Leave my mother out of this, Ms. Hiffernan.”
    Jo wrapped the sheet around her naked form and walked over to his precious canvas. She took his glass, drank his wine.
    “What will it be?”
    James took his time answering, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled and exhaled.
    “It’s you, dear. Don’t you see it?”
    She took his cigarette from him, puffed. “Will it make more sense if I drink more wine?”
    He grinned that acid grin and pulled her close. She sat on his lap on his painting stool and looked at the canvas. Gesso, a hint of gray, and a single white form blocked out in the center.
    “That’s me?”
    “That’s you, my dear white girl.”
    Jo smiled that Irish smile, dimples in full effect, and he felt something for her...