"The Quiet Apocalypse"

It was another humid, sweltering day during the summer of '96 that he died. Despite this earth-shattering event, mosquitoes still buzzed busily in the air and the clacking of his neighbor's sprinklers never ceased, as though everything in the world were perfect and nothing had changed, as though Charlie's life hadn't shattered in the instant he received the phone call and was told that his best friend--nay, his brother--had died in an accident; an unfortunate, tragic, and--as some would even say--historically important and philosophically profound: how the greatest geniuses of our world are never found and recognized, how the youths with the most potential die young and flawless, with only the echoes of their prematurely destroyed legends left to whisper in their wake.

Charlie and Arthur were enemies before they were friends. Neither of them had grown up rich; Charlie's father worked in a paper mill on minimum wage and Arthur's mother (his father long since dead and buried) worked as a schoolteacher at the adult school at the edge of the city. Being fiercely aggressive about defending their lowly stature in life, but given rather small and scrappy frames with stringy muscles, neither of the boys could very well fight the larger kids at the school, so they fought each other. Then one day, Arthur followed Charlie home with the intention of toilet-papering his house, expecting to find a grand, two-story house grandly painted in white with sky blue trimmings, and finding only something that resembled a shack after it had been hit with an extremely large sledgehammer enough times so that the actual frame of the house was broken and the building was only able to keep upright by leaning on the structure of its neighbor. After that, Arthur never wanted to fight Charlie again, even when the other boy needled at him about his "cushy, silver-spoon lifestyle". He'd just figured out that it wasn't sarcasm. It never had been.

So ten years down the line and a million fights and muttered apologies later, through misdemeanor and public indecency charges, meticulously planned frat-party crashes, and a five-year stint in the Navy, Charlie and Arthur lived the lives of quiet champions, lounging on the edge of their suburb like it was the last satellite before they shot for the moon. By this time Arthur had started on his book, what was to be a massive 300-plus page masterpiece of witticisms and observation.

Then he died. All it took was one split second, the keening siren of the brakes shrieking in his ears and the sound of the oncoming car's drunk driver pounding on his car horn, again and again and again, never seeming to allow room for breathing or time to swerve and hit the guardrail at the edge of the highway, where Arthur would bang his head on the wheel and probably need a couple of stitches, perhaps a cast, but would be released from the hospital within a few days to see his mother smiling weakly, relief and happiness evident on her plain face for the only person who still connected her to the world, who gave her life purpose…

But the collision seemed to happen before it even started, and the aftermath was a smoking mash-up of steel and rubber and glass, the drunk driver unconscious and leaning heavily on the door, but breathing. Arthur was dead on arrival.

At his funeral Charlie put together some words that made everybody who attended cry, but which meant nothing, really, when it came down to it. It was the same kind of thing anyone else would have said at anybody else's funeral. Nothing would do justice. Arthur was the one who was good with words, not him. When everyone had left, Charlie sat next to the headstone and watched the sun sink into the earth, turning everything red and gold and painful. Then Charlie finally thought of a real thing to say.

"Thanks, you know. For not toilet-papering my house."

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One year later, Arthur's book came out. It was 378 pages, with a single page afterword by a certain close friend of the late Arthur, which told a story of a laborious friendship and a most unfortunate death and what happened after.

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Das Ende.