The Remainder

I was there when the world stopped.

The planet had a stroke and every living thing dropped dead. Everywhere, blood stopped pumping. All at once. From pole to pole, from continent to continent, from the top of the sky to the depths of the ocean trenches. Fish floated to the surface. Birds plummeted to the ground. Airplanes dove, cars crashed, and every pedestrian became a rag doll.

The machines stopped, too. Lights went dark. Heaters went cold. The organic thrum of engines gave way to silence, and every carefully-cooled room returned to the uncomfortable sticky heat of the outside.

The wind halted and the waves went flat. The trees wilted and the sands stopped rolling. Rivers froze in their tracks and waterfalls tumbled their last. The clouds dispersed and the sky went hot and clear and yellow.

First it was cacophony, of course, as all the things that had to stop stopped. Here I was in the middle of the street as cars rolled and crashed to a halt, and the helicopters whirled off into concussions of sound and fury and death, and the bugs tumbled down to tap out their grim morse against the ground like aborted raindrops and birds splattered the pavement  and the lights went out.

The planet tripped and fell on its face and broke its neck. A whoosh and a crack and then the slow drip drip drip of a little blood as the last few human beings landed, staring vacantly at the ground or the horizon or the sky.

And then.

And then.

It’s impossible to express what “silence” really is. You’ve never heard it before. Even in a room with no sound, enclosed and away from the pulsing and groaning of the rest of the planet, you still have your heart pumping in your ears, the slow whoosh and sigh of your own breath, your hair bristling and your skin scraping roughly against other skin. You don’t know silence because you know the sound of the inside of your body. The ringing in your ears. The spasmodic twitching of your thoughts.

This was silence.

The world hit its head and went deaf.

There was silence.

And I was there to see it.

I knew in an instant what it meant. All living things simply ended. The living earth stopped living, and all things that moved and changed halted in their inexorable tracks.

I must not be alive.

I had never been alive. All living things are stopped, and here I am still going.

The earth exhaled and drowned and couldn’t breathe anymore and sank into the bog, smothered into purple-tongued silence and bulging bloodshot eyes rolled back to stare into its own dark eye sockets. Things don’t decompose. Even the bacteria are dead. The air doesn’t move as I shamble through the cluttered streets, and yet I can persist even though the stagnant vacuum won’t let me breathe. Every bump in the uneven pavement becomes a shard of diamond in my feet since it won’t erode under my weight. The millions of millions of dead don’t even have the courtesy to stink. Elephants and whales are dead and so are the amoebas and microbes. They don’t even stink.

They just sit there just as they were when the earth fell into the gorge and dashed out its brains on the rocks and its little thoughts scattered everywhere.

I had never been alive, and yet I am privy to the end of the world.

I can’t tell if the sun is still alive. Everything is the same temperature so the heat isn’t going away into space because the air is dead. But I can look right at the sun and I can’t burn my eyes out for some reason.

The damp loam is rock under my step. The snow is an ice sculpture that I can’t climb. The air won’t move.

Silence.

Silence.

You will never understand.

I am still here.