The End and the Beginning [A Short Story]

What is Life?

We made our way through the leaning first class rooms, examining trinkets left behind and the faces of the few passengers that were left in the rooms. "How about this?" I said, kneeling down on the floor to look at a necklace that had fallen there. "It says 'Ana' on it. Does that sound familiar?"

The woman in red looked away from a collapsed pile of bones dressed in a suit to see where I was on the other side of the room. "No," she said. She turned back to the well-dressed skeleton. "I wonder where this man is..." she said, more to herself than to me.

"He wanders the hallways," I said. "I'm sure we'll pass him on our way to one of the other rooms."

The woman in red sat back on her haunches and looked at me with a strange sort of smile. "How long have you been doing this?" she said.

"Doing what?" I asked, sitting up to match her posture.

"This," she said and held her hands out as if to explain. "Studying the people on the ship, counting everyone, looking at all the stuff... how long have you been doing this?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. It feels like I've been here forever." Sure enough, I heard the moaning cries of the suited man echo in the hallway. "There he is. Go look and see if you recognize him," I said, confident that she wouldn't know him.

She hurried down the hallway only to return a short time later. Her slumped posture made me feel bad that I had gotten her hopes up. "I'm sorry," I said.

"It's not your fault." She shook the sadness out of her form, like a shiver, and straightened herself up. "Besides, we have plenty more people to look through, right?" She flashed a smile so wide that it made the water around her lips shimmer.

I smiled and got off the floor to show her to the next room. It took us all night and well into the next day to go through all of first class. Toward the end of our hunt in first class, her disposition began to waver and her hope began to wan.

"I'm sure we'll find something," I said. "If you're here, that means the rest of you has to be here too, right?"

"What about you? Have you found anything of yours yet?"

"Not yet," I said. "But there are still parts of the ship I haven't been able to explore."

"Oh? Why not?"

"They're too dark," I said. "How about if we start looking through the middle class rooms?"

"I think I need a break from looking," she said. "It's too depressing."

"I understand." Quite honestly, I was grateful for the chance to stall. The thought of her finding her own body, which, I was positive, was lying on the third floor down in middle class, was terrifying to me. It created a world of "what ifs" and "oh nos." What if she found out she was married, and her husband was there with her body? What if she no longer wanted anything to do with me once I'd helped her find herself? I would become, essentially useless to her. "Why don't we go back up top and see how many more are awake from the glass float?"

What we found on the top deck was most surprising. A large crowd of cognizant wreck-dwellers had gathered near the glass float. Standing in the water above them were Dale, Thomas, and Silas. Together, they seemed to be holding some kind of meeting, and they had raptured the attention of the whole crowd.

"What do we do now?" One of the passengers asked.

"I suppose that's completely up to you," Dale said.

"But what's the point of even existing?" another said.

"I'm not going to get into a philosophical debate with you," Dale said. "We just wanted to work out some way for everyone to find their families and maybe even themselves. I think that if we do this in an orderly fashion, it'd go a lot faster."