Short Story: Splaynor by ApocD - a podcast by ApocD

Splaynor didn't want to die. He was in no immediate danger of dying, at least not that he knew of, but his death was out there somewhere, just waiting to come in and sweep him away to nothingness. He didn't like that, the nothingness, nope, he didn't care for it one bit.

His kind embraced death as a step, but Splaynor couldn't understand how dying was a step, unless it was a step down. Their culture celebrated death, threw parties for people who'd died, and prayed to the two suns for death to come, but usually not until they were very old. The two suns delivered, too, although sometimes not as quickly as one would have hoped, especially in situations of extreme pain. Splaynor's grandmother had lain in bed for three transits, pain racking her body, as she prayed for a merciful death that never came.

Splaynor's friends never talked about it. That didn't bother Splaynor too much; he knew there was nothing they could say to take away his fear. They knew nothing more than he did. It was like physicists talking about the insides of black holes; none of them would ever know, for absolute certain, what was in there. Maybe death lived in black holes. Splaynor didn't want to find out.

Splaynor got depressed. His friends avoided him. His family talked of only the most surface things, like the next vacation to the Spameel Flats or the latest imports from the second moon. It didn't matter. They were all going to die. Nothing mattered when you knew you were going to die.

Splaynor was eating less, which meant he had less food gathering to do. That was good. Splaynor hated food gathering. It would be so much easier to store food in homes, but that wasn't the way, and ways didn't change.

The days grew shorter. Splaynor hated the cold season, when the gathering became even more difficult, and the food lost its taste. He lay on his mat most of the cold season, staring out a round window in his home's ceiling up at the sky, watching the suns cross the sky, waiting for them to drop so he could watch the stars. He preferred the stars. He sometimes wondered if there was other life out there, wondered if there were beings out there looking up at the stars wondering the same thing. He wondered if any of them felt the way he did. He doubted it. They probably had as many rules and distractions as Splaynor's kind, enough to keep them from thinking about anything real until the end was upon them.


The cold season faded, but Splaynor's depression remained. He strolled among the flowers on the hill on the edge of town, the hill where he had watched the stars with his friends when he had been young. They were all gone, most of them to the cities, but some of them to their graves. Thinking of them only made Splaynor feel worse.

It was nice being back on the hill. Townsfolk nodded at him as they passed, some young ones said hello to him. As he stood and soaked up the heat of the two suns, he had an idea. If death scared him so much, then he would make himself miserable. He was almost there, anyway, so if he just continued, then he would be so miserable he would want to die. He would welcome death like an old friend.

Splaynor called the townsfolk within hearing distance a bunch of flipping idiots who probably still thought the two suns went around the planet. The townsfolk didn't like that. Some stared, but most grumbled to themselves and kept their eyes down. Splaynor yelled at them again, just to make sure they heard. He was sure by the end of the day it would be all over town, and then everyone would really hate him. Making fun of people was bad enough, but doing it in public where everyone could hear, well, that was unforgivable. Unforgivable Splaynor. He liked the sound of that. It didn't exactly roll off the tongue, but neither did a lot of things that sounded good.

On his way home, Splaynor stopped by his parents' place and told them he didn't want to speak to them again. His mother cried, and for a moment Splaynor thought he would take it back and tell her it was a joke, but he didn't, and as he walked away from the house, through the streets crowded with workers returning from the wells, he felt terrible. He was off to a good start.

Back at his house, he looked through his things for anything that he really liked. He had a collection of rocks that he had brought back from the eighth moon, the rocky one, when he had gone there on a learning trip. His first trip off planet meant a lot to him, so he opened his door and threw the rocks out into the darkness, where they would be lost among the pebbles and stones surrounding his home. He felt terrible. For years he had studied those rocks, used them to remind him of better times, and now they were gone forever.

His mat was the next to go. It was too comfortable. Splaynor would have to get used to sleeping on the floor. If he got used to it, though, then he wouldn't be miserable, and he needed to be as miserable as possible. As he threw the mat onto a rock pile behind his home, he knew he would eventually have to think of something worse than the floor, maybe sleeping on rocks, but for now the floor would suffice. He hated leaving the mat outside. It would look awful and Splaynor hated people who just threw their junk outside instead of disposing of it. He would be like the people he hated, and that would make him more miserable.

Splaynor thought it was good.

Back inside, he lay on the floor and watched the stars through the round window in this roof. He would have to do something about the window, either cover it with something or just paint over it. For tonight, he would just close his eyes and force himself not to look. It would be tough, but that was what Splaynor wanted. As Splaynor's mind raced with ideas of how to make himself more miserable, he fell asleep on his hard floor.


The next day, the rays of the two suns came through the window in his roof and woke him. It was late. He had slept longer than normal, but that was to be expected when one was miserable. It was working. He finished his food gathering quickly and then went to town, where he heard whispers as he walked the streets. Splaynor stopped at the homes of his best friends, people he had been friends with since he had been very young. Some of them even had young ones themselves, and as Splaynor watched the young ones run around the homes of his friends, he felt jealousy welling up in him, a feeling that he had been left out through no fault of his own. He told his friends everybad thought he had ever had about them. He let it all out, letting them know all of their faults, and as the truth poured out, Splaynor could see his friends breaking, falling apart. Some of them yelled at him, but most just asked him to leave, and a couple of them had just stood there with looks of shock. Splaynor had shown himself to the door.

Splaynor returned to his home. The light of the two suns was failing. He gathered pebbles from the land near his home—he wasn't sure if any of the pebbles had come from Moon Eight—and carried them up the side of his home to the window, where he spread them out so that they covered the window. The window sat in an indentation, which held the pebbles nicely. He liked the idea of using pebbles instead of just covering the window; they would allow some like through, reminding him that he couldn't see what was producing the light. It would make him miserable.

Without family, friends, mat, or a view of the outside from his home, Splaynor went to sleep.


The hot season was halfway over. No one had visited Splaynor since his exercise in making himself miserable had begun. At first he had missed everyone, but the feeling had passed. He didn't even miss his view of the sky.

He was sleeping on rocks. Every morning when he woke up, his body ached, but after some time, even that bothered him very little.

Splaynor decided that his first efforts to make himself miserable had been too weak. He'd probably never actually liked his friends or family, anyway. The feeling had just hidden under all of the feelings he was supposed to feel for them, but never actually did. Something stronger should work, though. Something to truly make him miserable.

He tried to think of people, other then people with terminal illnesses, who really wanted to die. The first example Splaynor came up with was the crew of the Buffalo, the spaceship sent to visit the farthest away of the giant planets. Several malfunctions had conspired to leave the engines inoperable, and the spaceship had just drifted right past the planet and on out into space. Their communications equipment worked fine; the ground crew had listened for over a year as the crew of the Buffalo had drifted and then starved to death. There were rumors that the crew went crazy, some killed and ate each other, but no one but the ground crew knew for sure, and they weren't talking.

The Buffalo's crew had spoken to the public through their transmissions on several occasions, and toward the end they'd talked about how much they just wanted to die, how much they just wanted that release.

Splaynor had no access to any spaceships, and anyway he didn't want to starve to death. He liked eating. A disability would make him miserable. He could poke out one of his eyes, maybe all three, or just cut himself up so that he was disfigured. He didn't like that idea very much. The thought occurred to him that after some time, he might get used to it. Then, he would have a disability and still not want to die.

Splaynor decided that before he did anything more, he would see the town elder, if the elder would even see him after all of the things Splaynor had said.


The elder let him in. That was a good sign. The elder offered him a mat and asked him to sit. The elder looked a lot older than he had the last time Splaynor had seen him. Perhaps the cold season had been rough, or perhaps Splaynor just hadn't been paying attention before.

The elder asked Splaynor why he had come and Splaynor explained the situation.

The elder stared at him for several seconds before speaking. “You want to be miserable so you'll want to die?”

Splaynor nodded. “Yes, that's right.”

“Do you believe in the creator?”

“No.”

The elder nodded. “I see.”

Splaynor edged forward on the mat. “Is there anything I can do to make myself so miserable that I'll want to die?”

The elder studied his hands in his lap and then looked up at Splaynor. “Yes, there is.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Get old.”

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