Show Notes
This is the season finale of New Tales Told.
I wrote this one because of a fact I couldn't put down. The universe is expanding, and it isn't going to stop, and the stars are burning the only fuel there is. The bright ones go first. The small, dim, stubborn ones last the longest, trillions of years, and then, someday, the last of them goes out, and there is no morning after it. The lights simply go off, for good. I kept thinking about that final star, and about who, or what, might still be there to see it go. Not the science of it, really, but the loneliness of it. The last witness in a universe with nothing left to witness. That question became a watcher, and a long vigil, and this story.\
It's called Dark. I'm glad you're here for it.
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More from New Tales Told – Original Short Stories
He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.
Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.
There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.
Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.
Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.