With the giant meteor fast approaching, the world was finished—totally doomed—which was fine with Sochl, a black-shelled tortoise, hard, unbreakable, and thoroughly energized by the prospect of having the Earth to herself.
Something told her that this was necessary. That sometimes the earth needed a cleanse. But maybe that was just the hard-shelled privilege talking, her biological preparedness for what the forest creatures dubbed The Shatterstar. The frightful animals claimed the meteor would shatter the world. It'd break all life. And Sochl, secure in her shell, couldn't imagine anything cooler. "Yeees!" she'd say at night to the meteor, "Shell yeah! Break it!"
And because the meteor was massive, it'd darken the planet, shaving away half of the daylight hours and handing it over to night. A nocturnal world signaled the end times, oblivion in its truest form, though to Sochl it was a welcome change. A better world was beginning. And also, the color black was her symbol, her soul color.
Black tortoise, black world. It was just a thing.
So Sochl was ready for the post-life world—as were the other tortoises, the armadillos, the oysters and crabs and river clams, and especially the snails who now slung themselves about in curvy S patterns with so much swagger, so much non-fear, for their shells were apparently mighty. But if you didn't have a shell, tough luck.
The meteor showers of the past two months were all business—no luminous comet trails scarring the night sky—but instead black pebbles pelting the trees, the lakes, the roofs of campsite RVs. The shards presumably broke from the Shatterstar itself as small, hurtful warnings to the creatures below. Occasionally a sparrow was shot from the sky.
"Wow," Sochl said.
"Of course!" A nearby snail said. "Grow a shell, dummy!"
She wanted to flip him over like she'd done to many a tortoise, but you couldn't go around flipping snails, not with that pittance of armor. Was she apathetic about its well-being? Of course. But was she a murderer? She hadn't been pushed to it, and she didn't yet see that in her. So she chose a reasonable response to the ignorance until the Shatterstar properly erased him. "Like you'd do any better."
"Please. You know what they call me?"
"I could live without the knowledge-"
"Diamond!"
"Forgetting, forgetting-."
"Because you can't break me baby! Say it with me. Diamond!"
"I'm going to vomit on you."
"And you can step on me too! But it won't change a thing! Diamond is unbreakable baby!"
Where did he come from? Why did the earth create him? Sochl had no answers to the foolishness of the modern day. Though perhaps the interaction explained why for a slow, non-migratory being like herself, she'd experienced more out-of-season temperatures, more natural disasters than the most well-traveled of creatures. Cleansing. It had to be a cleanse. What else could it be?
She walked away, chanting, "Cleanse, cleanse, cleanse..."
Diamond was confused, but moreso full of self-pride, so he left in the opposite direction with his newfound, confident S strut.
The calamities, the certain dooms, the cataclysms, were normal in this world, occurrences that Sochl had grown to love. Twenty-five years of life and Sochl witnessed the choicest moments of planetary destruction. She'd marveled at Earth rebelling against life with heatwaves, forest fires, the volcanic eruption of a long-dormant volcano, a three-year Ice Age, flesh-eating fungi, new species of corrosive vegetation, daily earthquakes, the gradual disappearance of knowledgeable, boundary-respecting park rangers, and seasons of quicksand and rock-slides and menacing sinkholes. The earth had a mouth, she was amazed to learn, and the terror it spread was riveting. From the moment of Sochl's birth, everything that followed was a curious occurrence, wild plot-twists that her tortoise biology couldn't outrun but properly withstood. And the earth, like Sochl, withstood its own violence as well.
After each calamity, earth simply bounced back. Trees, grass, bodies of water in their proper, convenient places. And the present moment was one of those unbothered but fleeting times. The world had a way of reconstructing, of coming back for more. The planet was unbelievably, non-sensibly resilient. So Sochl connected to the planet on a deep, personal level. The earth's chaos, without a doubt, was her element.
But the chaos of her neighbors, the atmosphere they spread around her during the earth's most wild, grandiose moments, was the real enemy.
Though Sochl lived through the blunt impacts and heat and toxins and ice sheets, she was trapped within the madness of the forest. Migration, travel—those simply weren't tortoise-y options.
So she bore witness to sparrows confident enough to fly during meteor rains, snails that now considered themselves the master race, and even the campsite humans—the supposedly smart ones—breaking their necks toward the pretty meteor rain, staring raptly, allowing Shatterstar fragments to pelt their faces.
But an overwhelming majority of the animals were usually alright, bafflingly so, though Sochl had long suspected that luck had tons to do with that. There was no justice or sense in luck functioning against her, in Diamond—and other such mineral-named creatures—being unbreakable.
Here is the only sense she knew to be true: the world had a habit of dying, and she was fortunate for her hard shell, which apparently was death resistant in all respects. Nature loved her, but it also loved everyone else. Somehow the flimsy, the arrogant and annoying, always found a way to survive through the impossible calamities. While Sochl was excited for the world's upcoming transformation, its thousandth agonizing, beautiful death, the other animals would definitely enter her space, howling and peeing and doom-saying in the most vexing ways.
Her thoughts turned to the snails, their ridiculous survival. How? You're literal slime. She had a bad feeling about them. Somehow, they'd turn out to be the worst. She'd lived through so much that her intuition had sharpened into fangs. Were they durable? No. But how sure was she that they'd be spared extinction? Very sure, tragically so—
Crack!
A meteor rain starting up, a sudden distraction from her worries.
The pebbles Meteorite pebbles rained down. Sochl wondered how the sky supplied the rocks in that way. So dark, so shiny...The meteorites rained down as the forest creatures fled for cover—into a cave or a hole or well-placed nest or running river. Sochl just stared at the grim, black stones, their charming deadliness.
She wisely withdrew into her shell. A moment to be enjoyed. A moment for her to relish.
And then, from somewhere within the distant forest, Diamond's laugh echoed.
*
Step one in building comfort in the wake of the Shatterstar's purifying crush: tunnels. Big ones, long ones, sturdy ones, dark and quiet ones. Sochl had a clear concept of how well the post-life world was going to treat her. A massive habitat. An expansive, subterranean shell. Tortoises tunneled, it's just something they did, and while most dug themselves a few holes in which to sleep, Sochl wanted more.
Forty tunnels, that's what she created throughout her lifetime, slowly, steadily, the entrance of which was a beaver cave that emptied out during an earthquake. And, conveniently enough, the river ran along the side of the cave, allowing Sochl to quench her thirst in luxury. She'd even decorated the dirt walls with turtle-shell patterns and etchings of her favorite forest flowers, mostly poisonous ones. Décor aside, her tunnels all led to rooms that functioned in the ways that humans described their own homes. A master bedroom, some nap rooms, other lay spaces—Sochl was a master in the art of leisure. There were bathrooms linked to other deeply dug tunnels that functioned as plumbing. She even had a kitchen positioned right where the roots and clover mostly grew. No need to forage, the foraging did itself as Sochl effortlessly collected her meals.
When the Shatterstar touched down with its inspiring blackness, Sochl would emerge into a new world, the hum of annoyance leveled out into a brain-soothing silence. And those black stones—Those gorgeous, gorgeous rocks(!)—would be laid out for her to gather, an apocalyptic hobby all planned out.
So she spent the short days, the long nights, digging.
One night while lazing in the master bedroom, a rumble.
Is it time? Sochl's synapses crackled through her whole being, her body easing upward, slowly, slowly—but excitement was excitement and she was compelled to surface. She rushed from tunnel to tunnel as the rumbling continued, and eventually, a whole twenty minutes later, she surfaced.
Finally, she could enjoy the show.
Meteor rain, more severe than she'd ever seen. Black rocks larger than hail—and coming down fast. She surveyed the forest and watched the precautions that everyone else had made. Sparrows were flying low under the cover of tree branches and cliffsides. The bears cowered near the entrances of their caves. Several unfortunate foxes were in open fields, dodging the rocks as best they could—which honestly wasn't well at all. They were pelted and let out high-pitched whines. The humans, in their parked RVs, watched from the windows and held up their phones, their expressions ranging from amazed to concerned. Drive! Sochl's mind screamed, What are you doing?
And lastly, there were the snails. Diamond and his crew were all in one spot on the edge of a rocky overhang, challenging the star shards to do their worst. Sochl imagined them as round, squishy targets of idiocy. No shade or cover, just bravery and snail shell. They were aiming for their own extinction, quite obviously, but unlike the foxes, not a single meteor landed near them. She sensed their smiles, the pride vibrating from their antennae. And their words pickled her soul.
Stolen novel; please report.
"These guys need to get like us."
"Look at that fox! What kind of shell-less dance is that?"
"Ha! Another bird down!"
And the meteors kept falling and falling, missing every snail. Maybe the cleanse isn't working right, Sochl thought, Get one at least.
Right then a small meteor, a star-bit if you will, landed near the snail circle, skipped a couple times, nicking the side of Diamond's shell.
Everyone paused. They stared at the shell, its absolute intactness. From Sochl's vantage point, another smidgen to the right and that was it, poor Diamond deservedly dusted—though he'd be too dead to recognize his wrong. There was no death, though. Just obnoxious life. They were living the moment of their non-apocalypse, flexing their adamantine bodies. The snails gleamed, then joyously erupted.
"Did you see that?" Diamond shouted.
"We saw, we saw!"
"Dumb meteor tried it!" Diamond declared.
"Sure did. Big old brainless rock!"
"We're unbreakable!" Diamond shouted at the sky. "Give it up, you stupid star! What can you do? You're already dead! D-E-D!"
A sharp gasp surged from Sochl's innards. The disrespect of the sluggy cretins knew no bounds. "Disgusting," Sochl said.
Diamond turned toward her in the distance. He couldn't hear her, not amid the shattering rocks and howling animals and lack of ears—but the vibrations of her displeasure struck his nerves in the most satisfying way. Blank face. Hardly a mouth. But his expression was shit-eating anyway. And Sochl, her intuition on fire, had the misfortune of knowing it.
An hour later, the shower ended and Sochl returned to her lair, at least satisfied that her shell and her tunnels held up-
And then a voice. "Save us!"
And another, "Please, help!"
And at least a dozen other voices chiming in, which, when Sochl accepted the sight before her, she reluctantly acknowledged the presence of mole-rats, rabbits, a fox, a grizzly bear, and even a Labrador retriever from a human family, all within the cave entrance of her home.
"We don't wanna die," a mole-rat said.
The fox whimpered.
The bear whimpered—in a much lower pitch.
The Labrador whimpered as well, then lifted its leg and peed its fear.
"Right," Sochl said. "Dying would be the worst."
*
One week was all it took for the lair, the treasured lay spaces, to be taken over. And the Shatterstar was fast approaching, too. Unquestionably the worst time for squatters. But the very animal idea of territory went out the window with the looming threat of astral annihilation. There was no certain timeline as to when final impact was coming. Calamities simply came and went—quite often at that. Assuming the worst was to assume the truth, and Sochl's tunnels presented itself to the forest creatures as an opportune refuge, a formidable, rock-blocking shelter.
But in the refuge, they panicked, they cried, they wrecked the order of Sochl's home.
Despite the 40 tunnels and dozens of rooms, the bad energy had nowhere to go. Always a whimper, a sigh, the scratching sounds of tongues licking new wounds and scars. The wolves (when did they get here?) howling at nothing, unable to see the moon.
Sochl often found herself in the kitchen where she munched on roots, stress-ate clover. And for a while, the only detectable sound was her own chewing—until the scratching.
Crumble! Thud!
Mole-rats breaking through, puncturing a hole through the kitchen wall.
"Dude, again!" Sochl said.
"Sorry!" One of the mole-rats said, "Please don't hurt us!" And the other mole-rats shook their heads nervously in their own shaky apology.
"Couldn't you guys tell it was hollow?"
They squinted at the damage. Mole-rats were essentially blind. They lived in the dark and dug wherever they felt the softest dirt. Sochl had her answer already. This was the third time in the past week.
The mole-rats were replacing the dirt, padding the broken wall in a patchy, artless way. But Sochl appreciated the repentance.
"Here," she said, nudging some roots toward them. "You're foraging, right?"
"You sure about this?" said Monty. Suddenly, without fear, the mole-rats looked to her as a mom.
"Yeah, there's plenty. But please, don't tell anybody."
"Thank you! Sorry about the wall!"
The mole-rat colony took the roots away—digging downward this time. New damage to the kitchen, yes, but at least they were thoughtful. Sochl headed toward her room, one of them at least. Well-earned sleep, that's what she needed.
When she arrived to the master bedroom, the entrance was blocked. A bear was half-outside, half-inside, growling in its sleep, drooling like a cub. The back end of the bear consumed Sochl's turtle pit, a shell-shaped dirt groove in which she slept. The dark thought bloomed in her that once the Shatterstar hit, the future was exactly this, the animals reaping the benefits of her self-made shell. Her preparation, her comfort, turned against her. She needed to figure something out—but first, sleep.
She turned back and headed toward another room. For once in her life, she resented her heavy stride, the natural sluggishness that stopped her body from keeping pace with her anxious, scurrying mind.
Sochl progressed, achieving a modicum of speed, when an audible rumbling occurred in the tunnel. She peered upward. Meteor rain? Another? So soon?
Dirt clumps fell from above, the tunnel roof collapsing and caving in right before her, obstructing her path again. The Labrador panted atop the debris pile.
"Really Fido? Were you digging?"
A guilty look.
"Ugh."
He got up, lifted its leg.
"Don't! You're not allowed!"
Whimpering. Wet widening eyes. That poor doggy routine.
"Please don't punish me any further. Put that leg down."
He did.
"Good, now let's go. Up, up, up, let's go."
Fido—though who knew what its name was—obediently took Sochl on its back and rode her to the surface, past the mole-rats frantically eating roots in a corner, and the foxes (Multiple? Since when?) who whined in their sleep, and the sparrows caressing their injured wings with their beaks, along with dozens of other beaten animals that Sochl didn't remember entering the shell. Fido arrived at the entrance, a miraculous 20 seconds since taking off, and Sochl climbed off and lumbered outside. Her lair was consumed but the surface was blessedly clear.
Night sky, comfortable darkness. Many stars gleamed in their deceptive whites—whites which darkened by the second into Shatterstar blacks. Calmness coursed through her, her energy renewing, her limbs loosening. Fido knew his duty was done and retreated into the cave. She heaved out a sigh, prepared to recharge in the quiet, animal-deprived darkness. Alone...shell ye—
"Nice commune!"
Oh no.
"You guys make such a happy family!"
Diamond. And a hundred other snails. They oozed about the rocks, the logs, the leaves, the stems of beautiful flowers that the meteors, somehow, also missed. The surface was theirs apparently, and Sochl, having taken forever to surface, eased down in defiance.
"Say something oh great shelled one. Tell me about your buddies. Have they recovered? Is the shell treating them nice?" Diamond said.
"Next time, it'll rain salt."
"Ha! Salt! Hear that everyone? She thinks we'll die from salt."
Everyone laughed. Everyone relaxed in their glory. It was a new day for snail-kind. The world, as of now, was theirs, and they knew it.
Space, where would she find it?
Not inside, and certainly not here.
She took a step forward, then another step, and trudging onwards into the night. Her slowness, her inability for swift departure from the snails, was painful. But the snails were done with jeering at Sochl, and instead directed their taunts upwards.
"Come on Shatterstar. Hurry up and break so we can get some sunlight already!"
*
Sochl walked for a long, long time.
She walked until her legs got tired.
She walked until hunger made her stop to eat.
She walked until the Shatterstar closed in and finally, after concealing all else, eclipsed guidance of the white stars.
After a much-prolonged stroll, she realized that she should've seen daylight by now. A brief glimmer of dusk(?). A strip of sunset purple(?). But the Shatterstar had blotted out the sun too. No more days. No measure of time. Only one continuous night leading to the final impact.
Sochl's confusion quickly faded as her enjoyment of the perma-night poured through her. She watched the shadows overtake the entire forest. Evergreen turned to forest turned to espresso and steel and twilight and finally black. In the darkness, she shuffled the pads of her feet against the corpses of star fragments. The meteorites littering the ground were as numerous as the snails that clung to practically every surface. The logs, the tree trunks, stray boulders. The snails were everywhere. She couldn't see them but could hear their slopping slug-struts staining every surface. They were relaxing, prepared for the cataclysmic show. A tacky wetness clung to her feet but she tortoise-shuffled through the horrifying slug trail, feeling their muted snickers. In the blinded world, the lessons were clear as the local sipping pond—that the slimy are long-lived. That the stupid sometimes happen to be the chosen.
Up to a point, she hoped. The stupid can't win forever—they can't, right(?).
Within the thickening pitch, her wishful musings sustained her. Sochl saw the snails as a shriveled pre-butterfly cocoon of a blacker, greater fate, and that in the post-Shattering the world would deliver justice, serenity. Too hopeful? Possibly...But Sochl forced herself to believe that a change, a flattering one, was destined for her beloved, perpetually reincarnating earth.
She couldn't die—she mustn't—and the infinite futures stretched before her empowered her heart.
Sochl peered upward, certain that the Shatterstar would deliver her favorite earth yet. When the earth dies, you can only offer vibes—so Sochl came to believe.
Black. The sky was so black. The blackness absorbed everything—the clouds, the moon, the sun, and by this stage in the Shatterstar's progression even the treetops were ruinously cloaked. The darkness had sunken low, skimming the surface. The Shatterstar was coming. Everyone knew. You couldn't not know. The feel of the darkness penetrated everything living, and everything soon to cease.
Sochl took a step, kicked a star-bit, and heard it drop into the water after a too-long pause. She was at the edge of a cliff, or that was her best guess anyway. She paused, tried to turn herself around-carefully, carefully—but then the waters below kept splashing. She figured it was more rocks she'd knocked off the cliff, but the splashes were louder, faster, and then reaching high enough for her to feel a mist.
These weren't her rocks, not a chance.
The roar of rocks was mighty and frightening. The force couldn't be assigned to a creature or known phenomena.
Sochl knew—everyone knew—what was to come on the heels of the stony rain.
"Shell yeah!" A sudden outburst, pure joy. She'd tunneled, she'd journeyed, she'd meditated. After all she'd endured, the excitement within her was enough to make her combust. What's next, World? How will you break? How will you disperse your gleaming blacks?
The snails were fully alert now-a buzz radiated from them within the world-consuming pitch of the Shatterstar.
"Ha! Where are the animals for this one?" one snail said.
"Hiding in caves, pretending to have shells."
"Idiots! Don't they know that caves cave in."
And for Sochl, who withdrew into her own shell, a glimpse of fear gripped her for the first time. The home she left behind was a masterpiece, of this she was certain, but calamities were calamities and she hoped her neighbors, her sudden tunnel-mates, were untouched this time: the foxes without a wound to lick, the sparrows gliding within the underground without getting shot down, Fido surviving only to re-surface and pee outside for once. And the mole-rats—well, good luck to them. They were hopeless, helpless, but they were good creatures. Friends—in a way. Friends to the...Not 'end'. Please don't let them end.
"Oh wow, it's landing!" Another snail said.
"It's breaking, it's breaking!"
"This is what the other creatures hid for? Hahaha!"
And lastly, Diamond, whose shock could be heard from miles away, "Nooooooooooo-"
Other snails chimed in with their Noooo! exclamations as well.
Sochl knew what that meant. As the cliffs shattered, the trees felled, the natural damage of a cataclysm accumulating as everyone should rightly expect, the snails—while dumbly durable—clung to surfaces that weren't as durable, weren't as wondrously lucky as their bodies. Sochl wouldn't flip a snail but the Shatterstar, its startling finesse, managed the impossible. The snails, lovingly, were turned onto their backs.
Sochl enjoyed that vindicating moment, a brief giggle, and then—
The Shatterstar—its impact was suddenly upon her, and as its savage gravity grinded into her shell, she knew she wouldn't break, she simply couldn't, especially on the cusp of a perfectly black world. The darkness touched her, pressing heavily against her, and she knew that she was made for exactly this moment. Up close, under the crush of the star's oppression, she knew that she'd never seen anything more beautiful. It was the greatest possible gift. Black soul touching black soul. She knew, without a doubt, that the universe loved her most. And though the calamity would come to its unfortunate end, Sochl, reveling in the colors of the shattered comet, would gleefully collect the pieces.