Even Marble Crumbles
Even Marble Crumbles
I was working on the sculpture when the first city disappeared.
The voice in my ears was as calm as it ever was as it reported the news, as if it were just another outage or temporary travel problem. A city had gone missing, leaving a few scattered buildings around the edges and nothing more. It was being investigated, of course, but there was a secondary problem - no one, not even those who had been in those last few buildings, could remember anything clear about the city. Its name, who had been there, anything.
I tried to remember if I knew anyone who lived out there, and drew a blank. I had to hope it was because I was an introvert, and no other reason.
The voice reassured me that a solution would be found soon, an answer. I looked over the photos of the site, the strange square hole and the cut-through buildings of ivory and gold, and I did my best to believe it.
In the end, I went back to work, drawing the delicate vanes of feathers in the marble. What else was I to do?
Days passed, weeks, months. Reports on the investigation became more sporadic, especially as nothing new came from it. I think most people wanted to forget, to go back to their private worlds. Discomfort was an unfamiliar feeling.
But the city was not the last.
It was a trickle, at first, and then a flood. More square holes found in pristine, endless forests, or bisecting palaces and mansions, or even once in the middle of the ocean, crystal-clear water endlessly running into it and disappearing. And more, too. Writers reporting angrily that hundreds of their books had been turned into gibberish. People collapsing, frozen, staring at nothing, sometimes coming to, more often not. The sky going from night to day and back in rapid flashes.
The calm voice that told me the news never faltered, but there were less reassurances of answers, less promises of understanding.
I finished the sculpture. I did not start another. Part of me, familiar, said I had time. After a month or a year or a decade I could begin again.
I think, even then, another part of me knew I would never finish another work.
I was out in the gardens when the end came, among ever-blooming flowers and the legacy of all my years of work. My latest - my last - rose in the center, a manmade angel, wings spread, hands raised in blessing or prayer.
The way the terrible rainbow light of the flickering, distorted sky reflected against her was beautiful.
Eons ago, there was another world, with banks of computers and endless flashing lights, with pods for us each to enter, with the promise of an eternity.
But now our heaven is falling, and I suspect that, after all this time, there is no one left to hold it up.
For me, the sky went black, and the world ended.## TLDR Summary: