Silence

Author’s Note: I unlisted this short story because I was submitting it to a non-vocal contest. Sadly, I didn’t win. I hope you enjoy if you’re new :)

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I don’t remember the day the world ended. But I do remember the day I noticed.

That photo was it, but I did not know what it meant until I sat in my darkened bathroom, staring at the newly developed film. The street was neither empty, nor abandoned. It was dead. The colours of the flowers wrapped in that red ribbon caught my eye, and as I crouched to take that photo, I could hear only the lonely silence of a graveyard after dark.

Looking down at those discarded blossoms, I thought of nothing. Noticed nothing except the artistic potential of the scene. Gazing at that art, however, brought rushing to my mind the total silence of absent things. Once upon a time, my city was a loud, vibrant place. Like most cities, it smelled awful, was overcrowded, and cars had taken over. We were an inconvenience getting in the way of our four wheeled overlords. Not so anymore.

Despite their lingering presence in the background, they were nothing more than ghosts. Banquo waiting at the corners of perception, reminding us of all that we lost.

Funny, isn’t it? The things we least enjoy are also least missed when gone. Least noticed in absence. I know how it felt, walking out my door and noticing the myriad things to be dissatisfied with. But as with the world’s slow decay, I did not notice it until that photo of the flowers. Until I looked again at something mundane made unique by my world’s slow entropic decay.

Suddenly, my mind filled with the missing, the holes left behind, the crushing silence of absent things. I read a book once, damned if I can remember the name of the thing, where the author described such a silence. It seemed magic, that silence, or so I remember. One made of things that should have been, and yet were absent.

Alone in that darkened room, alone in that hollow building, awareness grew. It had been festering, expanding, growing in the shadowed corners of my heart. The awareness of things that were missing.

Waiting for the photos to set, I’ve forgotten the term. The word to describe when exposure to light would no longer ruin them, I sat back on my heels and listened. Beyond the gentle hum of electricity, the thrum of life coursing through the building’s veins, there was nothing. A void as silent as space, a darkness as full of terrors as a child’s closet door on a stormy night.

How long had it been since I’d last spoken to a neighbour? A week? A month? A year?

My work has always been a solitary endeavour, my hobbies isolating. It was the life I wanted to live, trapped in the city by enjoyment of its amenities, revolted by the heaving mass of humanity. But where had that humanity gone? I knew, of course. I knew deep in my bones what had happened. Where they lingered.

Occasionally, I would wonder how they might feel to know that their lives were still there. Waiting in case they ever returned from their final journey. But they would never come home. Idly, I slid a cigarette between my lips and waited. Naturally, smoking in doors was strictly forbidden. But when was the last time I’d seen my building super? When was the last time I’d even paid rent?

My timer went off. Without really noticing, I touched the button, returning to the infinite silent nothing. If I turned off that little red light, the one that would never hurt my precious photos, and sat in the dark until I died, who would notice? My family was gone, and the pain of their going long since healed. Funny that I don’t count their leaving as the day the world died. But there had been so much going on, so many other facts onto which I could latch. There was no reason to consider the collapse of my life as the end of all things. As the end of time.

Days and nights had passed. Months, perhaps years. On auto-pilot my hand drew out the small, silver plated lighter and struck flint against the steel. Touching the flame against the end of the cigarette, I barely registered that I was even smoking it. Mind filled with glaring gaps and absent things.

Children had taken over the streets, I remember that. Not roving gangs intent on causing harm, only children playing their noisy games among themselves. I was happy for them, I think. I’m certainly happy for them now, despite their long absence. I thought with pleasure that the streets of the city had reverted to their original purpose, a place for human being to live their lives. Yet even their gleeful shouts and laughter was gone now.

Had it truly been gleeful? I don’t remember. There had been an edge to it. A slightly manic edge that sliced through their revelry, the same as it had done for me. A knowledge, somewhere deep down that something was wrong, missing. Dead.

Dead. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not the world that died but rather myself. The slow fossilization of myself, locking into routines that did not matter anymore. Living in a world without the warming knowledge that I was not alone.

It was on that day that I noticed. On that day that I realized the world had died.

The day I developed that film and saw the flowers in their red ribbon. Dropped or thrown, lost or abandoned, joy or misery. It was evidence of a human life in flux, evidence of something living and growing. Evidence of a humanity I might have shared had I been there but an hour, a minute before. Yet seeing them, lying discarded on the pavement that looked new despite its age thanks to the absence of rolling wheels, only made me aware in the end that I am alone.

My knees drew up to my chest, cigarette long burned out. Completely alone, living in the corpse of a place that had once been home and prison to millions.

For me, that was the day the world died. The day I noticed. The day I realized that I had become an island, the one thing no human should be. I barely noticed the tears as they fell, eyes locked on that one photo. Reminded of the life I had missed by mere inches. Sitting in the dead silence of a world that I had outlived.

Fin.

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This story was written for the latest Ekphrastic Challenge by the always inspiring Mackenzie Davis! If you haven't read her entire body of work... why? Go get on that.