This Is the Part Where You Start to Say Goodbye Copyright © 2018 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #63, May-Jun 2018

I love stories about the end of the world. They are all stories about Heaven. Even if they don't want to be. A hard Heaven. But nonetheless, a Heaven where we are truly free.

A life where we no longer have eight to five jobs, or rent, or periodic dental cleanings. Every day is Saturday. A new world where we are free to do whatever we want, even steal, and go wherever we want, feeding ourselves with cans of food stuffed into our pockets. (And really, the endurance of canned food is so central to apocalyptic fiction, I wonder if the whole genre of end-of-the-world stories isn't secretly sponsored by the canned food industry. "Canned peas. When the world goes to Hell in a handbasket, it's good to know you've got a reliable source of vitamin K in your back pack.")

After all we know collapses, the world will still be littered with canned food.

When I was a kid I used to walk down Greenwich Avenue each day during Summer recess, about a mile, to my grandparents' home, located on the charmingly-named Steamboat Road, with its evocations of Popeye and early America, on Long Island Sound. Their house backed-up on the Atlantic Ocean, weathered boat dock at the bottom of their backyard extending out into the swishing green ocean water. At low tide they had their own sandy beach, and at even lower tide a stretch of black mud where you could throw down a heavy rock, watching for upward squirts of water from the black ooze that told a young boy where clams were hiding, burrowed just under the sludgy surface, ready to be dug out, washed under a steel faucet, hard gray curves tilted left and right, spilling off grit, then steamed, eaten.

I wake up in the middle of the night next to Mary's warmth, her exhales, and an idea squirts up in my mind. We all know the tragedy of not writing down an inspiration as soon as it occurs to us, so I lean over the edge of the bed, not really wanting to, because I'm tired and lazy, get out my yellow legal pad, my pen, and in the darkness of two a.m. try to write out the crucial phrases very clearly, but barely able to see them. The next morning, waking up, remembering, I lean back over and lift the legal pad, to see if what I wrote is legible, but a lot of times, it isn't. And that inspiration is gone forever. Which makes me so sad. Blame my right hand.

My grandmother was the kindest person I ever knew. Isn't that often the case?

My grandfather was the worst sort of Irish. Angry, violent drunk. Dressed each day in the same black suit, shock of white hair above his thin, ruddy face, black and white sneakers. Flask of whiskey in his back pants pocket, which he sipped from throughout the day.

When I walked down to my grandparents' each day, it was to help them out. Cook their meals, mow the lawn, carry out the garbage, weed their tomato garden, assist with other physical tasks they could no longer manage. My grandmother had Parkinson's, so it was difficult for her to do anything. She needed an aluminum walker to get from one room to another. The hand tremors from her disease prevented her from accomplishing anything that required any degree of dexterity, such as flipping a hamburger in a skillet.

Once my grandmother faltered and failed, and died, my grandfather was left alone in their quiet house on the ocean. Woke up alone, cooked and ate alone, took a swig from his back-pocket flask alone, went to sleep in his bed alone.

He took to thumb-tacking slips of paper around the house. Whenever I visited him after my grandmother's death, and I didn't visit often, and I wouldn't stay for dinner, and if you ever met my grandfather, and sat on his sofa as a young boy staring fixedly at the quiz show on the black and white TV trying not to show any reaction to his violent, self-pitying tirades, you'd understand, I'd see these yellowing paper squares tacked to the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets, to the white-painted sides of the rear windows overlooking the ocean, the walls of the hallway. Whenever he staggered outside to make sure no one was driving too fast on Steamboat Road, I'd get up off the sofa and read as many of them as I could. They all were about what he wanted done after he died. The telephone number of the lawyer who had drawn up his will. Name of the funeral parlor he wanted to handle his burial. People to call, to notify them he had passed. Where the key was to his boathouse in the backyard. His bank account numbers.

Years and years later, when I was an adult, deciding to become a writer, I would write brief notes myself, about writing ideas I had, each note about the same word length as one of my grandfather's tacked-up squares of paper. So that's something I inherited from him. The need to document. And it helped me. So he wasn't all bad. People rarely are. When Mary and I first got together, we of course shared stories of our past, as all lovers do. One night in bed, the two of us lying next to each other away from the wet spot, I started talking about my grandmother, the kindest person I ever knew, and she was surprised my grandmother meant that much to me. When I asked why, she said, "Because up to this point, all you've talked about is your grandfather." And isn't that true? We talk not about the ones who loved us, but the ones who challenged us. That old saying, Love the ones you hate, because they are the ones who changed you.

I'd write my story notes on a turned upside-down legal pad. Each time I'd scribble down a small inspiration for a story, and be able to decipher it later, after the rush of blue ink across yellow paper, I'd tear off the strip of paper from the pad, add it to the other torn-off strips for that story, clasped together by the circular whorls of a big paperclip, metal thighs clamped around a happy face.

My mother had a key to my grandfather's house. Found him dead on his bed in his upstairs bedroom. Old eyes staring straight up at his uninteresting white ceiling. All those tacked-up notes of his, which the family found weird at the time, actually came in handy.

Sometimes squatting down beside a newly-lit orange campfire deep in the dark woods of your latest fiction you realize the words you've been walking through, stopping each night to rest, just aren't going to work out. The trees are no longer interesting. And you say goodbye to that forest rising around you, that could-have-been story.

And even when your notes do lead to a successful story, a story you're proud of, feel sure will sell, there is that mixed feeling as your typing fingers march closer and closer to the final line, and you realize this writing session, a few more taps on the Enter key to start a new paragraph, you're going to march right to the end of things, bumping your forehead, and it is rather painful, against that final period, that end of all things.

I'm not my grandfather. I hope. But just as his little scraps of paper told people what to do for him after his death, my little scraps of paper, my story notes, which birthed stories, tell people what I want them to do for me after I die. Keep reading me. My grandfather tried to control the future. So am I. I don't want to be a beautiful tomato plant that flourishes one season under the sun, and then falters, fails, and dies.