You fidgeted nervously with your purse, searching for some way to open the front door. In the silence I heard my shaking breath. We stood in the corridor as I choked out the words. I loved you too much to even be mad at you.
I tried to pretend I understood, that I didn’t blame you for not wanting to try anymore, that all my frustration and pain were no match for your frustration and pain. You were the love of my life, and it had never occurred to me that you might take that away from me. Large chunks of deep, staggering hurt and dismay at how calmly you announced these words, without the tiniest clue that this was the most painful thing you’d ever had to tell me, that you would die a thousand deaths rather than having to tell me this. My heart shattered to pieces on my abdominal wall. What I felt was the best thing in my life, for you had been a burden. It was the last lie between us, or actually the first lie of not-us, because you no longer wanted an us. The first time was when you lowered your eyes the day before and said: It’s not you, it’s me. It was the second time in two days that the world had come to an end. I was staring at my phone, waiting for you to call. If the world had come to an end, I wouldn’t even have noticed. I was lying on the couch, not doing anything really. We saw him dwindle and dwindle, until he landed in his own sad orbit around the sun. Planes, satellites, and space stations disappeared into the vacuum, and even Father Moon was pushed away from us. In one upwards thrust, it all fell into the atmosphere.
Tired of her burden, Mother Earth shook off anything that wasn’t tied firmly down to her surface. A mole sticking its nose up from the ground was seized by reversed gravity, and a whale jumping from the waves would never dive back into the sea. People sitting on their porches somersaulted until they landed on creaking awnings and stared out over their rims into fathomless depths. In no time, the sky was dotted with tumbling people, fluttering clothes, floundering dogs, careening cars, clattering roof tiles, mooing cattle, and whirling autumn leaves in colors that set the sky ablaze. Before anyone even realized that the sky was no longer above, but below us, people started falling from the face of the Earth. Those who survived lay bewildered on top of them, trying to comprehend what had just happened.īut woe the ones who were outside. Most of us died on the spot or protruded convulsing from holes in plasterboard ceilings. We crashed against ceilings and got crushed beneath the rubble of our old lives. Then began the groaning and the clattering, the roars and the screams. It was a moment of perfect madness, frozen in time. There was a moment, one magical moment, when you could see us all floating in mid-air halfway up our living rooms, upside-down in whatever pose we had been in at the time-coffee drinkers drinking coffee from inverted coffee cups, lovers clinging to each other’s falling bodies, old men groping for slipping hairpieces, children crowing and cats screeching, all of us surrounded by the asteroids of our possessions. It happened like a bolt from the blue, at ten-o-five AM. But there was no colossal object, and being taken by God is a dubious given. Religious people, unlucky enough to survive the miracle, said that life was give and take, and that God was now, after so many years of giving, finally taking. Scientists lucky enough to survive the event said that it wasn’t so much that gravity had disappeared, but that it had flipped over, as if our planet had suddenly lost all of its mass and was surrounded by some colossal object. But it wasn’t like that-the world simply turned upside down. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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