Calvin and Hobbes

The Faint Dying Light…

Epilogue

It was so bitterly cold that not only had municipal and school buildings closed for the day, but supermarkets and convenience stores had as well—and not just the local, Mom-and-Pop operations, but the franchises and the multinationals. It was so cold that being outside for just a few moments without the proper clothing was to risk frostbite or worse, because in cold like this, hypothermia could set in within minutes.

That didn't stop him, though, and it hadn't stopped him for the past few hours. He didn't have the choice to stop, after all, because he was on the road, and if he stopped, he was dead.

All of his worldly possessions were in a backpack, a tattered construction he'd found years before. In it were maps, trinkets, pencils, and a notepad that he used as a diary and drawing book. He had never had a taste or talent for art as a young man, but as he'd gotten older, he found that there were few experiences that could beat the quiet serenity of sitting alone on a bench and just drawing whatever came to mind.

Perhaps that was one of the few genes he'd inherited from his father.

His father…

He wondered what he was up to these days. Now, his father was no longer a young man; he'd be aged about… fifty or so, by his count, and assuming that his career had continued on the course it had been set on the last time they'd seen one another, all those years ago, just then he'd have started his own law firm and would be starting to rake in the millions.

He hoped those millions kept his father company, and his mother, in their empty house with their luxuries and their maids. He hoped those millions gave them happiness…

He sighed. His breath condensed in the air before him and then froze, and that was when he realized just how cold it was. He had to find shelter sooner rather than later, and food, too, or else… well, he didn't want to think about that.

It was hard to move, though, and harder to think, when one was in the state that he was in. After a run-in with police officers some years before, he had walked with a terrible limp, and he hadn't been able to eat in a few days. Apart from that, he was sick, he believed, but without a dime to his name and certainly without health insurance, he couldn't be sure about it and he certainly couldn't do anything about it.

He had scarcely been in a worse position in his life.

But now, things were looking up. He'd come here to this town in particular because one of his friends from the old days lived here, and though they hadn't corresponded in years, he was sure that she still had a soft place in her heart for him. Hopefully, she had a warm place in her home too, because if she didn't, he… he didn't want to think about that.

So, he adjusted the overused clothes he wore so that they looked marginally more dignified on his malnourished frame and spent the next ten or so minutes thinking pleasant thoughts as he made his way down an icy road to a series of squat, one-floor houses. He didn't recognize any of them, at least at first, but in time, his surroundings began to look more and more familiar until he found himself at a weathered oak door.

He knocked on it.

There was no answer.

He knocked on it again, and this time, his answer was a strangled yell from the center of the house.

He stood back, teeth chattering, and tried not to look too closely at the blackness spreading on the tips of his fingers. Instead, he smiled broadly as the door opened to reveal a woman inside, smoking her twentieth cigarette of the day. She was so monstrously fat that she used a mobility scooter to move around, and the behemoth limbs that protruded from her enormous torso had folds of flesh that simply couldn't be cleaned no matter how hard she tried.

Her house was as filthy as she was. Even then, a half-eaten and half-rotten cup of Ramen noodles was stuffed into the mesh basket on the scooter's handlebars, and the several flies and ants that seemed busy gorging themselves on it didn't stop her from gorging herself on it.

"Susie," Calvin said, "I'm so happy to see you again," he said sincerely. He grinned, hoping to make her smile, but she simply sat there and stared at him blankly out of the gaping indents in her face that served as eyes.

"It's-it's been so long," Calvin struggled to continue, but his teeth were chattering too much for him to speak. "I-I… Susie, I… need somewhere to stay for the night. Just for the night," he said. "It's-it's so cold, and I promise I won't steal any of your food or nothin'. I promise—I just need to stay here for tonight, please—"

But Susie simply shook her head.

"Naw," she said loudly.

Calvin felt his stomach drop to his feet and then shatter into a million fine bits of ice.

"B-but… why?" Calvin asked.

"Naw," Susie simply repeated.

Then, as Calvin stood and continued to try to smile at her, she closed the door in his face.

For a moment, he continued to stand there, but then he walked away, because he… well, he didn't know. He'd only thought to come to Susie's house and find shelter for the night there; he'd had no plan b. She had been his plan b, and now that she wasn't an option… he'd have to find something else.

So Calvin wandered down the unfamiliar streets, and the icy path they cut through the frozen woods. He had no idea where he was going, and it had been so long since he had eaten that he had no idea where he was. He didn't see anything before or behind him except for the snow, and the distant, diffuse blur of streetlights, and it was then that he knew that he would likely not live to see the next day.

The life he'd lived had prepared him to face his mortality at any time, but there was something very sad about meeting his end in such a manner. Calvin had always thought he'd go out with a bang, somehow—maybe he'd be attacked by dogs, or a gang, or hit by a car or something, so that at least the final moments of his life would be exciting. But this was so… so lonely and so silent that it made him want to sit down and take his face into his hands. He was going to die in the next few hours, and no one would notice or miss him. His body likely wouldn't be found for weeks, and when it was, he'd be just another crazy homeless man who had frozen to death in the snow. He'd be buried in an unmarked grave and that would be the way the faint, dying light took him forever.

He hadn't even found Hobbes.

That thought brought moisture Calvin could not afford to waste to his eyes, and for a few moments, he forced himself to walk faster. There was something ahead of him, he told himself, something to walk toward, but no matter how fast he walked or for how long, he felt that everything he was, had been, and would ever become was behind him.

Eventually, the road itself ended and Calvin found himself wandering through an overgrown field. He was likely trespassing, but at this point he was numb not only to the world, but its laws, and even the sharp bits of substance cutting through his boots to dig holes into his feet—

"Oh," Calvin realized with a vague sense of interest, the most acute thing his mind would allow him to feel, "this place used to be a junkyard."

Knee-high grass had grown in the field at some point, standing irregularly over the piles of rubbish people had thrown into it over the years. Everything was dried and frozen to a crisp, though, so whenever Calvin touched anything it collapsed into dust and vanished into the wind. Calvin wasn't in a better shape as he continued to amble along, trying to get his vision to focus on something beside the distant blur of the forest all around him, and the omnipresent haze of the falling snow.

At some point, he fell to his knees. He tried to get up to walk on, but he couldn't: he had walked his last.

He tried to think of something of importance, so that at least his final moments on Earth might mean something to him, but he couldn't. He wasn't even sure if he was conscious or not, and no matter what, he couldn't help but realize that his hand was on something incredibly small and frail, something incredibly soft—something incredibly familiar.

His eyes opened. He managed to sit upright and with trembling hands, he pulled a tattered bit of cloth out of the frozen wasteland and brushed some of the snow and the ice off of it. When he looked at it again, it was unmistakeable.

"Hobbes," Calvin whispered through blue, frostbitten lips. "Hobbes. After all these years… Hobbes."

He tried to smile, but the muscles in his face were no longer functional. So, he simply hugged that pathetic rag to his chest as tightly as he could and sobbed in an incredibly quiet, dry manner. He tried to speak, to tell Hobbes that it was alright, now that they were together again, and that since no one else was around, maybe—just maybe he could become himself? Just one last time?

There was no response, however, except for the howl of the wind in his ears as it kicked up, sending the snow billowing down toward him with even greater prejudice. The elements themselves were attacking him, it seemed, but at this point, Calvin was just too old, too tired, too cold to care. He didn't even care that Hobbes himself was almost certainly a hallucination, that he was probably just holding some scrap of something that his dying mind had told him was Hobbes out of mercy.

Calvin sighed and shut his eyes for the last time.

Then, the faint, dying light took him, and he knew no more.

(I had intended for the ending to be somewhat different, in that Hobbes was planned to have become conscious and be with Calvin for a moment before they both died. As it was, I am not even sure that Calvin found Hobbes at all, or if it was as he guessed that "Hobbes" was just a raggedy scrap and a hallucination.

Writing this piece was somewhat painful for me, because it makes me think about all the human robots or zombies that exist in the western world these days. I wonder how many thousands and thousands of souls are being killed right now, simply because some people don't like to deal with the high-spiritedness of some children?

I guess that's all there is to say about this matter… please review to let me know of your thoughts on this piece. Thanks for seeing it through to the end—I am sure it was painful for you to experience, too.)