“Postcard from the End of the World” by C.E. McKenna is our second runner-up from The Flash Challenge! In this essay, the titular postcard, sent by the narrator’s scientist grandfather, becomes a kind of touchstone for her. As the years accumulate, so too does the damage to the earth and the narrator’s understanding of her grandfather’s message. The prose in this piece is spare, the observations sharp and devastating.
The postcard arrived in early September 2000, written in black ink by Grandpa Malcolm. I can picture the front of it, the cobalt sky of a wintry arctic noon, dark above Longyearbyen, a small, glinting village rimmed by high cliffs.
At fourteen, I was disappointed Grandpa didn’t hand-deliver it.
More disappointed it wasn’t money.
Don’t act so spoiled, Dad said. You’ll remember this postcard. It’s a piece of history.
* * *
Four years after I received the postcard, I sat with my back to a roaring fire and Grandpa showed me a paleontological paper he wrote.
Sixty-six million years ago, a huge asteroid hit Earth, he explained. The impact superheated the air, igniting anything flammable. Nonavian dinosaurs went extinct because they couldn’t escape. But other species survived. Fish, amphibians, turtles, crocodiles. Birds dove into marshlands and termite nests.
And mammals—Grandpa’s specialty, his life’s work—burrowed. Lived. Evolved.
* * *
Eight years after I received the postcard, Grandpa Malcolm died. It felt, to me, like a small apocalypse. I cried so much, the dehydration gave me vertigo.
His memorial service was at the American Museum of Natural History. I gave a speech about the man he was: adventurous, determined, sharp-witted, sharp-worded. How he taught me to explore, observe, ask questions, be kind.
In the long hallways of the museum’s offices, Grandpa’s colleagues let us pull out drawers of fossils, wrapped in burlap. I cried again, grabbing hold of a doorframe when the room began to spin, and considered all the species whose apocalypses were far worse than mine.
* * *
Ten years after I received the postcard, a wildfire engulfed the foothills outside of Boulder. I watched the plume grow from the window of my rented townhouse. The churning gray cloud was made up of lodgepole forest and my friends’ homes. One evacuated in chaos, packing socks, forgetting his passport. Only his chimney remained.
Later, he rebuilt.
* * *
Eighteen years after I received the postcard, I walked the streets of Longyearbyen. The dry snow under my boots squeaked against the permafrost. Signs along the dark roads warned that polar bears were everywhere. Denizens carried rifles. Svalbard locals told a story: Two British women had been hiking on the towering cliffs above town when a bear attacked, backing them against a ledge. One woman fought, the other jumped.
The one who jumped survived.
* * *
Nineteen years after I received the postcard, friends and I visited Tonga, a kingdom of low-lying islands, surrounded on all sides by the vast and deep Pacific. On Vava’u, at the Cafe Tropicana, we sat next to a large, jovial man who heard our American accents and asked what brought us to his end of the world. The whales, we explained.
He was delighted and introduced himself as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development. I’ve just met with many Americans, he said, on business in Paris.
Paris! That’s a long way. What for?
The climate change summit.
Oh? We couldn’t put the picture together. Your trade is tied to that?
If the sea level rises, there will be no economy to develop. Our entire country will disappear.
The next day, we motored a small boat into the waves, searching for humpback whales to swim with. And we found some. A mother, breeching, singing, frolicking with her newborn.
* * *
For ten years, I’ve been searching for that postcard. But it isn’t in my house, and it’s not in my childhood bedroom. It’s not in cardboard boxes, stored in my parents’ basement.
Still, my father was right. I never forgot it.
Even if I might never know the exact words my grandpa wrote, I remember.
Dear Caitlin,
Today, we got to the North Pole. We were supposed to get off at +90° and barbecue, but we couldn’t do it.
When we got there, there was no ice. Nowhere to stand. Nothing but ocean.
It’s the first time anyone’s seen that.
I love you.
* * *
Today is twenty-five years since I received the postcard. Los Angeles burned. Asheville was washed away. Tehran is out of water.
It’s November in Colorado, and seventy-four degrees outside. This is one of the longest stretches in recorded history that Boulder has gone without snow.
When I am out of hope, I think of Grandpa. Of asteroids and extinction events, dinosaurs and mammals. Every apocalypse I can’t imagine.
Here is what that postcard didn’t say:
The earth is four and a half billion years old. It is robust. It is persistent.
If we go, we go.
Our demise will be another’s opportunity.
C.E. McKenna writes novels, short stories, essays, and reddit screeds from her home in the Colorado high country. She has history theses in the libraries of Reed College and Oklahoma State, and her short stories and essays have been published in On Fire and Under Water: A Climate Change Crime Fiction Anthology, Hippocampus, The Offing, Cagibi, and elsewhere. In 2022, she completed AWP’s 17th Writer to Writer Mentorship Program, and in 2024 was invited to the Chateau d’Orquevaux for a 4-week writing residency. She is currently an MFA student at UC Riverside – Palm Desert, where she serves as Nonfiction Editor for The Coachella Review. She gave up on Meta and X a while ago, so you can find her online at @ce-mckenna.bsky.social and cemckenna.com.