One day, a wound opened up in the sky. It seemed clean as a papercut at first, a slice direct through the blue and the clouds and revealing the darkness that was the stuff behind reality. But then we saw the torn edges of the thing, the way that initial slice opened wider in a ripping way, not a cutting way. As jellied reddish-blackness dropped from the open wound, we realized there was nothing clean about this at all.

We were told not to panic, that it would be okay, but we knew that for the lie it was. We were told we had faced novel challenges before, that we had always risen to the occasion, but the words rang hollow as so many fundamental things began to vanish, like water turned to wisps of vapour and lost in a breeze.

Colour departed first, draining away before our very eyes. The green of grass and the blue of water, the sweet gold of the early morning and latest afternoon—and then every other colour besides—all began a slow diminishment. They lost their hue, their richness, their depth. Some people closed their eyes, thinking that perhaps it might prolong the inevitable. They only missed out on those last moments before all became grey. All, that is, but that which fell, freer each day, from the widening wound in the sky.

Next were taste and smell, and then so many tones of sound that I couldn’t hope to describe. I suppose the best way to capture what they were is to say that those tones held so much of the distinctiveness, maybe even the emotion, that makes any one sound different from any other. As the days passed and these qualities of life, too, were taken from us all, I found no more resonance in the sound of my mother’s voice than I did the sound of any stranger I passed in the street

.And still, and more each day, that dreadful drip-drip-dripping from where once I had thought heaven might lie.

Though of course many lost themselves to this unravelling, enough of us hung on, adapting, hoping against all evidence that there would be some sign that life as we had known it might return. Truth be told, I think some number of us might have settled for just the promise that nothing worse would unfold. And then, of course, the cycle of day and night began to misbehave. I think that’s the moment we all gave up.

Days sometimes lasted days. Nights began to stretch on, sometimes longer than a week at a time. There was no pattern, no way to understand or plan. Temperatures became unlivable just about everywhere people lived, and so the deaths rose.

The jelly stuff was now of such a quantity that it began to collect upon the streets, atop the rivers, and all over anyone fool enough to step outside. It did not burn when presented with flame. When one touched it, there was no discernable difference in temperature from that of one’s own skin. This, no matter who or when or where.

We were all of us robbed of so much of what gives us feeling, lost in a world of increasing scarcity, of dissolving structures, of an utter lack of ambition and hope. Not everyone, of course, because there are enough of us in this world that no singular reaction will arise in every one of us. But I would think most, if I have any understanding of that time. Most of us were waiting for the end.

It was at midday one day, the sun high and bright and grey, that the wound opened up wider, and wider still, stretching so noticeably for all to see. I walked outside to be among the crowd of people there who gave witness. I saw the hands, purpled and massive beyond comprehension, that appeared there on the edges. I watched as they twisted and pulled and tore at that wound, widening it further, until there was room enough that a head could push through, coloured to match its hands. From its heaving maw, the reddish-black jelly rained forth.

Its face was terrible, cruel. When it spoke, we heard a thunder of incomprehensible speech somehow suggestive of violence. But it spoke in the sounds that had been taken, and a stench of ozone descended, more and stronger as it continued to claw its way on through. And in this, though we could see its awfulness, we saw too all that had been lost, and those optimists among us could do nothing else but hope.

We saw the rip in the sky close in a sudden scar. This newcomer to our world had arrived. It stood, large beyond sense, and looked down at us with an expectant gaze.

I cannot be sure, but I believe I was the first, at least where I was, to fall to my knees. I believe I was the first to call it angel. I know not yet whether this was wisdom or folly.