The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I watched each of them die.

I want to tell you that plainly, without softening it, because I think softening it would be its own kind of dishonesty, and I have never once, in all my long existence, found much use for that particular habit. One by one, down the line, kneeling men became bodies, the space between the two states shorter and quieter than I would have imagined, if I'd ever had reason to imagine it before that morning. The line moved closer to me with each one. I watched it move the way you'd watch weather approaching from a distance — not with panic, not exactly, but with a kind of settled, attentive awareness, the awareness of a thing that has already accepted it cannot change the weather's direction and has simply decided to notice it properly on its way in.

I looked at my own neck, or as much of it as I could feel without a mirror to show me, and thought, with the particular flat clarity I still didn't fully trust as my own, that perhaps this was simply what I had been made for. Not in any grand sense — I want to be clear that I wasn't building some elaborate meaning out of it, the way I think a mortal soul might have been tempted to, searching for purpose in the shape of its own ending. I mean it more plainly than that. I am a plant. A plant does not fight the scythe. It bends, or it doesn't, and either way, the field gets harvested according to its own schedule rather than the plant's. I had spent an age of the universe rooted to one particular hill, accepting whatever the sky above it decided to give or withhold, and some very old, very patient part of me had apparently carried that same acceptance forward into this shape, into this morning, into this line of kneeling men getting shorter with every soft, final sound.

I want to be careful here, because I think it would be easy to mistake what I felt for fear, or for hatred of the world that had put me there, or even for some effort to understand how I'd arrived at all — and it wasn't any of those things, not really, not underneath the surface of it. I did not spend that waiting wondering how I had come to be kneeling on ground that wasn't mine, in a body I wasn't certain was mine, surrounded by the bodies of men whose names I would never know. I did not ask myself whether this was truly my body at all, whether some other soul had once worn it more rightfully than I currently did, whether the marks across its skin belonged to a history I had no part in. A plant does not spend its strength on questions like that. It simply notices what has arrived, and meets it, as steadily as it's able.

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The man two places ahead of me went quiet mid-sentence, the particular abrupt quiet that told me, without needing to look, exactly what had happened. I felt the ground shift almost imperceptibly beneath my knees a moment later, some small tremor passed hand to hand through the earth itself, the way you feel a door close in another room before you've consciously registered the sound of it.

The man directly ahead of me didn't speak at all — simply knelt, and breathed, fast and shallow, each inhale shorter than the one before it, and I found myself, in the strange stretched moment before his own turn arrived, hoping, with an intensity that surprised me, that whatever came for him came quickly. I could hear, without needing to see it, the small, involuntary sounds his body kept making despite himself — a swallow, too loud in that quiet; a single sharp breath drawn in through the nose, held, released unevenly. I don't know why his fear mattered to me so much, in that moment, more even than my own approaching turn did. Perhaps a plant understands mercy for others more easily than it understands fear for itself, having spent so long rooted beside other growing things and so little time yet learning what it means to be one of them. I've had a long time since to consider the question, and I still don't have an answer I trust completely.

I noticed, somewhere in that waiting, that I had stopped counting how many kneeling shapes remained between myself and whatever waited at the very end of the line. Counting felt, suddenly, like a kind of cruelty performed against myself, each number simply another way of measuring how little time remained to be anything other than afraid. So I stopped, and let the line simply move, unmeasured, the way weather moves, the way a season arrives whether or not anyone standing in a field has bothered to count down toward it.

And then it was my turn, and I felt the specific, deliberate hand that settled against the back of my neck, guiding, without violence, exactly the position it needed me in, and I heard, somewhere above and behind me, the particular sound of a weapon being raised into the small, waiting space where a killing stroke needs room to fall.

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