It is win­ter, and I sit at my table with a thick sheaf of yel­lowed papers, held together with a wide black rib­bon. The papers smell of must and long sea­sons lost in attics. Star­ing dead ahead at noth­ing at all, think­ing of Ashe, I worry at the knot.

Snow blan­keted the ground when I first met Ashe, too. It was early spring, which in these lat­i­tudes meant that it was still win­ter, no mat­ter what the cal­en­dar might say.

He was a with­ered grey man, a stoop-shouldered crea­ture who had lived through two world wars and was hop­ing to be asleep under­ground before the next rolled around. He wore nar­row wire-rimmed spec­ta­cles and a black wool great­coat against the chill of the world.

We first met in a small cof­fee shop. He had made his shuf­fling way to the door, sup­ported on a cane, and I, enter­ing, noticed that he’d left his gloves behind on the table. “Sir,” I called, feel­ing fool­ish. “Sir, your gloves — ”

He turned and looked at me, his gaze blank and uncom­pre­hend­ing. I crossed to his table, picked up the black wool gloves, and wag­gled them at him.

“Ah,” he said. “My gloves.”

He insisted on pay­ing for my cof­fee, and we chat­ted about this and that — weather, pol­i­tics, hockey. Noth­ing of any great con­se­quence, yet at the same time every word was of grave import.

He was test­ing me, and I didn’t know it. Some­times I wish I’d failed.

On the table, the map is unfolded. I must be care­ful. The paper is brit­tle and oh so very old.

His cane was a gentleman’s weapon eas­ily a cen­tury old, a sim­ple cylin­der of dark wood that con­cealed a nar­row rapier of tar­nished steel. He showed it to me one day in early autumn, in his apart­ment. It seems to me now that that day was when I first truly knew him, appre­hended and under­stood him in full, as he handed the sword to me. I took it in my hands with care­ful rev­er­ence. There were roses and thorn­bushes engraved in the blade.

“Quite ille­gal,” he said. “But what dare they do to an old man?”

Behind him, dust motes danced in the sun­beams of his liv­ing room.

Nota­tions criss­cross the map, chick­en­scratch scrib­blings in fad­ing ink. Some are in Ashe’s hand­writ­ing, which I have come to know well. Most are in other hands, other lan­guages, other ciphers. He gave me a key with the map, a roll of parch­ment cov­ered in what the untrained eye dis­misses as gib­ber­ish. To the trained eye, how­ever, it is a Rosetta stone, with­out which the map is useless.

The day he first showed me the map, it was high sum­mer, a muggy, swel­ter­ing day deep in July. His small apart­ment was hot and humid. Age had pushed winter’s cold deep into his bones, and not even summer’s mer­ci­less sun could dis­pell the chill. As a con­ces­sion to my youth, he’d set up a small table­top fan.

The map was no less brit­tle that day than it is now. He unfurled it on his table, smoothed it del­i­cately with one bony hand, and said, “This is it. What I’ve told you about. This is the map.”

I couldn’t make heads or tails, in those days, of the writ­ings on the map. I said, “Where are we?” I was more than half jok­ing; the map looked noth­ing at all like a real map, a map of, say, the streets of Mar­rakesh. It looked like a con­fu­sion of spi­dery handwriting.

He stabbed down with a knobby, arthritic fin­ger: “We are here.”

I am not mar­ried, though I once was. That is a story I do not feel com­fort­able in telling, so let it suf­fice that I once was mar­ried, and now am not. I am not suited to this monas­tic life; it is not by my choice that I am alone on this winter’s night, as one year fades and another rises into view. I have known the taste of wom­anly com­pan­ion­ship, and there is much I would give to have it again. But Ashe chose me, the map chose me, and so: I am a monk.

That first night, the twen­ti­eth of July, a thun­der­storm rolled through town, bear­ing brief respite from the heat. I sat out on my deck with a cold bot­tle of beer in my hand, watch­ing the light­ning flicker and snap, lis­ten­ing to the rum­ble and crash of the thun­der, let­ting the rain soak me till I was shivering.

The power went out that night in Ashe’s down­town apart­ment. The next time I saw the map, there was a fresh line of ink, spelling out those words that weren’t words.

My tele­vi­sion is on, in another room. I can­not see it but I can hear it, and that will suffice.

My friends, the few that I have, are at a party across town. They will be drunk by now, deeply drunk, and there will be chips and dip, beer and wine, and the pop of cham­pagne corks as the clock chimes twelve. I wish I could be there, but I can’t.

Maybe next year.

I hope not.

We were in the cof­fee shop where we’d first met when he told me.

“You are the one,” he said. “The one who will carry it on.”

“Carry what on?”

“The map,” he said. “You’re the only per­son on Earth besides me that has seen the map.”

“What?”

“I’ve been watch­ing you since you were six. That day we met? It was no acci­dent that I left my gloves behind. I know you, inside and out. Bet­ter, maybe, than you know yourself.”

“You’re los­ing me,” I said.

“No I’m not. You under­stand me per­fectly. You just don’t want to under­stand me.” He sipped his coffee.

On the tele­vi­sion, Dick Clark is intro­duc­ing a band named Frigid Monks. I have heard of them, heard one of their songs on the radio. The song they play is unfa­mil­iar, the new sin­gle, as the singer says, off their album.

I wait.

The last time I saw Ashe was in his apart­ment. He was plan­ning a trip to Bar­ba­dos. He was always plan­ning trips he would never be able to take. Brochures lit­tered the table, four-colour repro­duc­tions of white beaches and crys­talline water and nubile sun-browned women in bikinis.

“Going on a trip?” I said.

He laughed from the kitchen. “Yeah,” he said. “One-way trip into the future.”

The ket­tle whis­tled, and we had tea.

The map is a map not of space but of time. It was cre­ated cen­turies ago by a monk whom many now con­sider to have been mad. There are pre­cious few peo­ple in the world — gen­er­ally only one or two alive at any one time — that know that his pre­dic­tions have, so far, all come true.

The map pre­dicts the fall of civ­i­liza­tion, and marks out check­points along the way. Some are major events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, noted in Ashe’s nar­row cur­sive. Oth­ers are small, such as the power fail­ure in a small city on the windswept Cana­dian prairie a decade ago.

But none of them are fixed in time. The events are all described, but not a one of them has a date beside it. So the keeper of the map must be alert, and mark down the dates and details of each event on the ancient parchment.

We have a map to the future, a grim and grey future, but we have no scale, no leg­end. We know what will hap­pen, but not when.

And so I sit at my dining-room table, all alone on New Year’s Eve, and wait for the next marker. I wait for Dick Clark to stum­ble on the words to Auld Lang Syne, and hope he doesn’t.

The next time I went to Ashe’s apart­ment, he was gone. The map was on the table, rolled tight and bound in black rib­bon. His sword cane lay neatly beside it.

He was dead, I knew. He would never leave it like this.

That voice, braided in amongst all the other singing voices, fal­ter and stum­bles: ” — we’ll take a, ah, kind­ness yet, for auld lang syne — ”

My blood runs cold. I pick up my pen and, gut knot­ting in ter­ror, write on the map.

We are one step closer, I know, to the end.

Some­times I imag­ine Ashe, in bright orange swim­ming trunks, loung­ing on that brochure-perfect beach, his bones finally warm under the trop­i­cal sun.

It makes me feel better.

---

Judges’ Com­ments

Oddly enough, first place in the Adult Fic­tion cat­e­gory was by far the eas­i­est for the three of us to choose. Patrick Johanneson’s “A Map to the End of the World” was on all of our short­lists and when Bruce, who was the first to go through his short list, men­tioned the story, both Nancy and I jumped in say­ing “oh yes, that was a great story!”

Most short sto­ries tend to be about small moments or ideas — there’s noth­ing wrong with this. It suits the genre. But “A Map to the End of the World” is one of those unusual short sto­ries that is about a big idea. That’s a dif­fi­cult thing to do. The story could eas­ily be expanded into a novel, though it works beau­ti­fully as a piece of short fic­tion. It’s well-written, of course, but part of its magic is that, as you read it, you really have no idea where it’s going. And when you come to the end of it, you feel as though you’ve expe­ri­enced a tiny sliver of a much larger world. Just enough to tan­ta­lize. All in all, it reminded me of some of Ray Bradbury’s finer offerings.