Where the World Ends

fictionspawn Aak, ,

Where the World Ends Aak fictionspawn

 

 

Timothy looked at the horizon. Far, far away he could see the blue sky meet the ground. That was where he was going. That’s where the answers lay.

He walked. He walked and he walked and he walked and he walked. The days became weeks. The weeks became months. Then one day he was finally there. The end of the world.

He could see clouds rise from the ground, moving up on the blue velvet covering the earth in a majestic half sphere. It seemed even bigger from here, the sky. He walked closer. His heart started beating faster. All his wonders, all his beautiful dreams. They were here.

He touched the sky.

It moved strangely, like liquid, yet firm. Its surface made waves around his hand. Tears were running down his cheeks, touching the edges of a bright smile.

He needed more. He needed to know what was behind the velvet. Behind the sky. Outside the world.

He tried to cut it. The fabric covered his knife, avoided it like liquid. He tried to jump at it, to fall through. He bounced back, gently, softly.

He started walking again, this time he followed the edge. As the sky by his side darkened, beautiful stars came up from the ground, shining brighter than he’d ever imagined. He touched them. They were warm, but not too warm. If he walked too far, he would arrive at the place the sun goes up. He didn’t think it would be a pleasant place.

In the early morning he found a crack in the velvet. Like two curtains hanging close to each other. An opening to the furthermore. With shaking steps he moved closer. He took hold of one of the edges, and pulled it a bit aside.

There was nothing there. Nothing at all. Not even darkness. Not even a void. Nothing he could see. Nothing he could understand. Nothing.

He hadn’t expected that.

He sat down on the ground, looking into the hole in the sky, confused and disappointed. He turned around, looked at the world he knew. For a long time he sat there. The sun went down and up again.

He got up on his feet. It was time to get home. His little sister was waiting.

 

Touch the sky. Aak fictionspawn

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason

Beyond Faith and Reason

Published by fictionspawn Aak

Norwegian trilingual writer and illustrator. Contact information in my Gallery.

50 Comments

      1. Maybe, the sun was a globule of warm delicious honey, and he would have filled a bit of it up in a jar, and shared it with his sister too! Both would have had a piece of the sun! Ha Ha Ha. 😄

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    1. Thank you. It started out as an “what if the world was flat” – thing, and it kind of just went this way. I’m reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though… there is some inspiration from there. Check out the wikipedia link 😉

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  12. That’s profound as hell. You know….I have all sorts of theories and things that truly tug at my heart and feel true. But every now and again I just wonder. What if we’re all making all this up? What if truly….there’s nothing beyond whatever we think is going on. Just nothing. How very anticlimactic! I love that he absorbs it. Then goes home. This is a cool one my brain will revisit for the next few hours. And…the art!!!! Love. Cheers!!! 🙂

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    1. You’re very welcome 😉 Thanks for asking! I’m currently reading the book in the Wikipedia link, which analyses the limits of reason. This story is very symbolic, but I guess I’m playing with the limits of how much we as humans are capable of knowing, and how much we can ever know, both empiricly and rationally. If the flat earth of our hero is a symbol of the Universe, whatever’s outside it symbolises metaphysical concepts. Which Kant in the mentioned book claims we are incapable of understanding. In this story you can think of it as Lao Tse’s Tao. According to Lao Tse, there’s something outside our capability of understanding of which we can’t say or know anything, which he calls Tao. So… The cuestion is: if we cannot know anything about something in any way, does it exist to us?

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  16. There’s an episode of the original Star Trek series called “For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky.” In this case, a population were living inside a generation ship. The exterior looked like an asteroid, and the hollow insides looked like the surface of the planet. People had forgotten over the hundreds of years that they were inside a ship and finally it became taboo to climb the mountains. Naturally Kirk and Company had to come along and set them straight.

    In your story, it’s more like the universe is a hologram, which has been seriously suggested in some scientific circles, and I recently wrote a story called The Jammsright Limit leveraging that and other influences.

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    1. Sounds interesting. I just saw an episode of the science fiction series Black Mirror, the first one in the fourth season, and there was scene very similar to one of this story (I had already published mine, I promise :D), but everything happened in a futurist “second reality” game. You’d probably like the episode, and the series have a lot of them 😉

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  18. What a fascinating story. I really enjoyed it and your illustration is really terrific. I’m glad I found your blog. I’ll visit again. 🙂

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