There’s a light dusting of snow. I watch it swirl around on my balcony. I make lines in my mind where it passes and tumbles leaving invisible trails of chilling arabesques.

I take Murphy out before my breakfast. Time has stopped. There’s a movie, I don’t remember what it’s called, where a magic watch stops time but the bearer of that watch can still walk through the stopped world. That’s me. The sun is diminished behind a thick haze of blank grey. The snow still tumbles in tiny flakes. But the earth has stopped, that much is certain. The ground, frozen, is hard under my old boots. And it’s inconceivable that a car should pass or that a person should come out of their house, and so it doesn’t happen. And we could be in the Arctic or the countryside or anywhere, not in the middle of a city. We live and continue to live in the canceled world. I didn’t read anything about the rapture in the papers.

Meanwhile eddies of snow dusting the world. And there is no sound at all except the sounds that I make. And they are quickly swallowed up by the giant vacuum of life and light and sound that pulls at it, at sound and at sight and at life just beyond my little space into which all collapses. I see no squirrels. No birds. The trees refuse to stir.

There’s a patch of ice. I slide my shoes around to clear it off. The grass underneath is trapped. A pine cone stuck on a slant beneath the surface. I am an archaeologist of a passed and fossilized world. I kick at the ice where it’s white and it breaks. Murphy plays at the end of her leash. She’s trying to pick up a scent of life, of any life, no doubt.

It’s not terrifying, not at all. It’s not lonely either. It’s a stunning quiet that won’t break like white ice. It’s the silence of a secret I keep for myself. And the snow from the dead sky continues to twirl and tumble and finely cover the secret earth.

SS