The Sun and all its Warmth
Created by kylie ziemke
It was raining when the world ended.
When it all went up in a crash of smoke and flame, when bitter February cold met biting metal,
the skies wept for their terrestrial counterpart. Grief flowed from the heavens, water mixing
with soot and ash and despair.
There was no glory in the end. No transcendence. No promise of eternity. There was only the
rain, and the fire, and the reckoning.
The reckoning came for Ellie Matthews in the dead of night, in an unforgiving February storm.
Why she survived the apocalypse and no one else, she didn’t know. But when Ellie pulled
herself from the debris and blinked blood and ash from her eyes, when she listened to the earth
wail, loud and louder and louder in her head, that inescapable torment, she understood the
meaning of grief better than anyone.
She thinks her own cries must have mixed with the wailing earth and grieving sky. Her throat
torn raw and weak by the end of it. She doesn’t remember The End, not exactly. Just
remembers the rain and howl and crash and fire.
And at the end of the world, time stood still.
Ellie saw the moment it all stopped. The moment the earth stopped spinning and the air turned
stagnant and her very breath seemed to freeze in her chest. Ellie hadn’t known time would stop
when the world did. But why wouldn’t it? There was no one left to need time, anymore.
After the world ended, Ellie went through those five stages she remembered learning about in
Intro to Psychology.
She denied it at first, waited for time to resume, to go back to the way it was before The End
when the earth still spun and the air still moved. Then she became angry, cursing the world and
God and herself, kicking and screaming and crying. Then she pleaded and begged for everything
to go back, prayed until her supplications turned to mush and ash in her mind.
Eventually, time did start flowing again. But not like before, Ellie supposed, no, it was never like
before. Now, time was stretched thin, pulled so taut Ellie feared if she plucked it the whole thing
would snap. Seconds crawled into hours into days, oozing like molasses from one moment to
the next, with no incline or motivation to move.
Ellie had no motivation to move. She sat and stared and lingered, waited for her body to turn to
rot like the rest of the world. Waited to join the world in The End, if only to give her a reprieve
from the crushing loneliness that sat heavy on her chest, poked her rib bones into the fleshy
parts of her heart and lungs and made it heart to breathe.
It was a baby that pulled Ellie out of her mind of molasses and supplication and rage. A
newborn, whose parents smiled so widely that Ellie could not possibly deny their existence.
Their happiness.
Because it hadn’t been the whole world that ended that February day, was it, Ellie? It had just
been Ellie’s world.
Here is what really happened the day the world ended.
Ellie Matthews and her sister Abby were on their way home from a late-night trip to the drive-in
movie theater. The sudden storm had ended the program early, the downfall too thick for the
projector’s beams to make it to the screen.
They were driving back to their parents’ house, through the winding hills. Ellie, laughing as Abby
tried to catch popcorn in her mouth. You're never going to catch it if you keep throwing it behind
your head, Abby, Ellie teased. It’s Abigail, her sister corrected haughtily, ever desperate to sound
like the grown-up she played pretend at being. Just weeks shy of her 18th birthday, Abby, the
sun and all its warmth wrapped into a person, had just been accepted into the same college
Ellie was currently in her third year at.
The trip to the movies was meant to be a celebration of things to come. It was never meant to
be the reckoning it became.
They blamed it on the storm, on the terrain. The earth and rock and mud slid down from the
hillside onto the road so suddenly, no one could’ve avoided it. Ellie swerved, but the raging
earth picked their car up with it and flung them over the guardrail. The police said the car must
have rolled six times before it hit the ditch with all the ferocity of Judgement Day.
Ellie woke slowly, a concussion blooming in the back of her head, slowing her thoughts. There
was blood in her eyes, glass in her temple. She looked to her side and saw Abby, her sister, the
sun and all its warmth wrapped into a person, battered and unmoving. Her arm, unnaturally
bent in front of her. Her face caved in from where the dashboard or the door or the wall had
pounded into it. There was a trail of blood cutting down the side of her head, dribbling like
molasses out the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were glassy. Her chest still.
And Ellie was blinking the blood and ash out of her eyes, and the world was wailing around her,
loud and louder and louder in her head. Only it wasn’t in her head. It wasn’t the earth wailing, it
was the sirens from an ambulance, loud and louder and louder as it came to get her. Anguished
sobs tearing through her throat as the firemen pulled her from the wreckage. Screaming Abby,
crying, howling, begging, Abby wake up!
You were in an accident. The doctors told her as they shined lights in her eyes when she finally
woke up after days of struggling to stay alive. To keep breathing. There was a mudslide and you
were knocked over the guardrail. Your sister didn’t survive the crash.
Abby didn’t survive. They said it with sympathy in their voice and in their eyes, like they knew
what she felt. Like they knew the world had ended in those three words. Like they knew Ellie
felt grief so big it stopped time itself.
Then came the denial, the cursing and pleading and inability to move from her hospital bed for
days. Time stretched thin, so thin there were days Ellie wasn’t sure she wasn’t dead too, so slow
the world seemed to move.
Time didn’t matter, anymore. Ellie had no hopes and dreams for the future. No desire to return
to class, to look her peers in the eye and pretend the world hadn’t ended. She moved through
time like molasses, unable to understand why time hadn’t stopped for everyone else. How the
world went on without her dear little sister Abby, without the sun and all its warmth wrapped
into one person.
Then came the baby.
Ellie had returned to the hospital to remove the wrappings from her torso that had held her
together while her broken ribs healed. In the room across from hers, a mother and father
cradled a newborn. Unbidden, Ellie peered in, watched as the father held his wife and child, as
the mother looked at her child like that little bundle held the sun and all its warmth.
Watched as the time passing through the parents seemed to speed up. Seemed to start racing
through them, as that mother and father looked at that baby like they would cherish every
single moment of time they ever got to have with them.
It was that baby that made Ellie realize that time passed through everyone differently. That grief
stretched it thin and love stretched it out, and everyone was just trying to get as much time as
they could. That time brought with it the end and beginning of the world in equal measure.
Ellie’s world had ended. It had ended in a crash of smoke and flame, when bitter February cold
met biting metal, and the skies wept for their terrestrial counterpart. But it wasn’t the end of
everything. Ellie still had time, time that her sister would never get. And didn’t she owe it to
Abby to make the most of it?
Kylie Ziemke is 2025’s 3rd-place winner of the Catalyst Creative Contest. She is a senior double majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology. She has always enjoyed using writing to bridge the intersection between science and humanity; in other words, the world as it is, and the world as we experience it. She wrote “The Sun and All its Warmth” to explore how our personal experiences and emotions warp how we perceive the passage of time. It is a story of grief so all-consuming it stops time itself, but it is also a story of perspective and of the light at the end of the tunnel.