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Excerpt from Killing the Last Dinosaurs: A Written History, publ. 2081
The little bird has been preparing for this day all his life. Everything looks perfect: morning dewdrops rolling off the jungle canopy like gentle rain, bleary-eyed sun poking its way through the branches, trees rustling with good-morning greetings. The bird flaps his wings once or twice to find the right spot. He lands on the branch just above where he was born. Now, everything in place, he starts to sing. His song bounces off the leaves and the canyons; through the caves and the valleys; over the mountains and down to the little streams that run high and fast in the springtime. It seems that it will go on forever.
* * *
17th June, 2093.
I never quite understood why you liked the country house. It was everything that made me me; you were my polar opposite. If you were to think about the country house now, you would probably remember the pancakes my grandma would make for us, before she passed. You would probably remember drizzling honey over them on lazy summer mornings, in that kitchen where the light would splash in gently with the sunrise, God’s golden fingers. Speaking of God, you would remember it was one warm afternoon in the field over the creek that you convinced me God was as real as the aliens you were always searching for. Funny. The way things have gone, maybe I should try to believe again.
The country house was wilderness and down-home cooking, days trudging muddy through the woods and nights warming up around the campfire. None of these things were really like you, though even now you would remember them fondly. But there is something you do not know about the country house. Something I was too scared to tell you before, because I thought you would look down on me for it, try to talk me out of it. It makes little difference now.
Long before you came to the country house for the first time to meet my family, long before we’d even met, my great-grandma lived in the house. This was when I was about eight-years-old. My great-grandparents had built the house and the land they had received as a donation from an benefactor who refused to be named (I still do not know who it was). Back in these days, my parents were having money problems; my dad would often leave for weeks on end and my mom would work double-shifts during the summer, stocking grocery shelves at night and working the cookie factory by day.
At the time my siblings didn’t understand much of this. We just knew that in the summertimes mom would send us out to the country house. It was different back then; not the country house you know today. We’d pull up in the driveway in June and pass our summers fishing and hiking and exploring and building fortresses in the trees. Great-grandma and great-grandpa would watch from the porch.
One afternoon, just a few days before we were to be sent back to school, great-grandma called Joyce and Ruben and I in. It was odd she had called us in this way, because the sun had not yet set and this time was usually allotted for playing outside. When we walked in she had this look on her face — almost like the look someone gets when they run up the train platform only to realize it’s just pulled out of the station. But much, much worse: there was a longing, a nostalgia, and a frank sadness in her look. Great-grandpa was not in the room.
“What's wrong, grandma?” Joyce asked. Great-grandma did not respond, which was worse than usual. It was hard to get her to stop talking, even on a bad day. After some time she shook her head, fluttered her eyelashes a few times. And the look on her face changed.
“Your great-grandpa has died,” she said.
For a moment none of us knew what to do. Some kids have a harder time grasping the severity of events like this than others. Ruben looked at my great-grandma, confused, then walked out of the room. Joyce asked when he would be coming back — she was only a few years old at the time. I started crying, big tears running rivers down the dust in my face. My great-grandma just kept standing there. When I had stopped crying my great-grandma looked over at me, an expression on her face that was not quite sadness and was not quite pity, but something else entirely.
“Come here, Thomas,” she said. I followed. She led us out of the living room, up to the bedroom. At the back of the bedroom she pulled a lever and a wooden cabinet came out of the wall. It was a hidden cabinet, the sort of secret compartment you see in the movies.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Come take a look,” she said, reaching her hand into the wooden drawer. A few seconds later she had pulled out a silver padlock. It must have been old — my great-grandma owned it — but it was shiny silver, and looked as though it had just been bought. My great-grandma held it in her hand in front of me.
“This is a love lock,” she said. “I suppose you’ve seen them on the bridge over the creek?”
“Yes,” I said. I had seen them, but I did not know what they were for.
“Couples use these to signify the permanence of their love for each other. They write, or engrave, their names on the lock. Then they take it to a place that has importance for them, and they close the lock. This one in my hand was mine and your great-grandpa’s. See our names on it?” And it was true — their initials were engraved on the side.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked, not sure what this was all about. As an answer, my great-grandma pulled a key from the wooden cabinet. She put it in the lock and turned it. And as she opened the lock, and I promise-to-god this is what happened, something on her face completely changed. The look as though she’d lost the world’s most important train was gone; the sadness was gone, too. Now there was a blank look. Complacent might have been a good way to describe it.
“What happened?” I said, noticing the change.
“It’s all over now,” she said, and she began to smile. “Now the lock is yours.” I stared blankly at her. “You should remember,” she continued, “that you can only use it once. Lock it with the girl of your dreams. If you are both in love with each other, it will work. And you will stay in love. When it’s time — when today happens — unlock it.”
“You’re saying it’s like magic?”
“It is magic.”
Reading this now I know you think I am being melodramatic, especially given the moment I am writing you this letter. You think I am exaggerating, or that I am trying to make you feel bad because I did not tell you before.
So now I ask you to think back to the bridge in Paris. You thought it was a silly idea; you laughed it off like it was a joke. But I persisted and this meant that you, naturally, pushed back. You didn’t want to do a love lock because all the tourists in Paris did it, because it was bad for the environment. I think you even told me it was the kind of thing your high-school ex would have done.
I begged and pleaded enough that you did it anyway. And the next six years of our relationship, well, all the way up until today, were the happiest moments of our lives. You may call it a coincidence; many happy relationships last for six years and longer. You, even now, reading this letter from the person you have spent the majority of your adult life with, will not believe me. But I do.
You should know that when we said goodbye this morning, I had the love lock in my pocket. I almost told you about it. I almost had you take it with you. There was no time, of course — you were bound to get on the ship, and the Alcubarre-Drive (or whatever the hell it was called) took a while to get prepared.
And then I watched you go, and I know that if you had looked at my face just then, you would have seen the same expression I saw on my great-grandma’s that day in the kitchen.
So, what will I do now? That is the question you, always practical, would ask me if you were here. You would have me chart out the pros and cons of unlocking the lock, even though you wouldn’t believe in the magic for a second. You would have me calculate the probabilities of each possible outcome.
Of course, because you are no longer here, I will do none of those things. The solution I have come up with is quite simple. First, I will seal the lock in a vault. I don’t have a custom panel in my bedroom, but the local bank offers vaults quite cheaply. And I will go and move to Spain, or to Portugal. I will meet a girl there and find a job there and live a life there, and I will finally be able to have children and live the life I thought I was going to live, before I met you. I won’t tell anyone about the lock, of course, leastways my new wife — you could almost consider it cheating, couldn’t you? In any case, it will stay locked.
When I die, they will take it out of the safe and unlock it. Then they will incinerate it for good measure, just after they cremate me. I take solace in the fact that, though I will have lived my life with the lock closed, I will not have forced this fate upon you; by the time I die and am cremated, only a few seconds will have passed from your frame of reference. In fact, by the time you read this letter, you will have lost your feelings for me many years ago. You won’t believe it, but I think it is better that way.
* * *
The little bird does not yet know it, but he is the last of his kind.
No matter how long he sings, she will never hear it.