THE HOUR IS GETTING LATE by K. PATRICK GLOVER

I always knew I’d be around for the end of the world.

Don’t ask me how. It’s not like I’m a religious man, or a superstitious one. I didn’t sit around thinking about The Rapture or the prophecies of Nostradamus. I didn’t spend much time thinking about it at all. I just knew that I would be there for it, that it would happen in my lifetime.

I just didn’t realize that I would be locked in a padded room when it happened.

Of course some people would tell you that’s the reason I was in the padded room to begin with, but they’d be wrong. The real reason, well, I don’t want to talk about the real reason I was there. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Does anything from before matter?

Do you remember that old poem about the world ending, not with a bang, but a whimper? Locked in that room, drugged out of my mind, I didn’t even hear the whimper. Just a sort of piercing silence.

No one came that day. Not the nurse that usually brought my pills or the orderly that brought my food. I noticed. I wasn’t so far gone that I didn’t notice, but I didn’t care. I had been kept drugged for over a year, docile, pliant. That doesn’t wear off in a day.

Or two. Or three.

On the fourth day, when the haze was getting thinner and the hunger was almost unbearable, I heard noise outside my room. Doors opening and closing, things being tossed about, somebody singing. Actually singing.

I sat on the edge of my bed and waited. I knew that she’d (the singing voice was definitely feminine) eventually open my door. I wondered what I’d say to her. Wondered, not planned, because I didn’t think my conscious mind, still working its way through the Thorazine fog, had any hope of controlling my lips. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to talk. It had been so long.

I told her, much later, that I had spent the time wondering what she looked like. If she’d be pretty. The truth is, it never occurred to me. She didn’t have that much reality in my mind. She was just a melodic voice that could open doors. I wanted her to open mine. That’s all that mattered.

When she finally did open it, and I managed to stutter a simple hello, she screamed. It was loud and shrill and it went on for a long time. Minutes, hours, days, who can say anymore. Later, she told me she screamed because she thought she was alone in the world. That it was just her and the things that roamed outside.

She had been searching the ward for things to make life more comfortable. I think she meant drugs, but I didn’t ask. There are a lot of things I never got around to asking her. I wish I had. I wish a lot of things these days, but my head was still so foggy back then.

I never thought to ask her name.

That’s the one I regret the most. She will always just be “her” to me.

I thought for sometime that she would be back. She had only intended to be gone for an hour or so. I may not be able to tell you much about the passage of time, but I know that hour is long past. My beard is much thicker now. My hair much longer.

I still think about her at night, when the howling outside is at its worst and I’m wandering the halls. I can still her faintly muffled voice, singing somewhere off in my head. The words just a bit too soft to decipher.

Sometimes the melody makes me smile.