the white days

When the world had ended, there was nothing left for them to do anyway except sit and wait for the slow crawl of the minutes and seconds and nanoseconds that marked the passage of their lives to stop. The feeling was of a room full of sunlight, and a blurriness that would not abate, as though they were nearsighted and had taken off their glasses. But perhaps they had; perhaps the sharp focus of the real world was false, and this--soft, blurry, warm, slightly off-balance--was what was really real.

He lay near a window, almost asleep in an unreal wash of sunlight, and curled and uncurled his fingers, over and over again, beckoning.

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When it began, nobody knew what was happening, and so there was little panic. Every day, the slow loss of senses until death did not provoke a reaction. It was the most perfect and beautiful thing; to slip away, to float on a sea of white static into nothingness. It could begin as simply as the sun, brighter than usual, burning white in a yellow sky, and it was so exquisite that there was no desire to disrupt it by telling anyone else.

Thousands of people died every day, stretched in front of bay windows gleaming with white light, sprawled on the floor of greenhouses where plants became surreal splashes of color, curled up in beds of white linen. Eventually there were so few left that it became obvious that something had happened, but nobody knew what, exactly, and since there seemed to be no way to stop it, it seemed there was not much use in panicking anyway. Three hundred people gathered in a sunny street in Rome, and saw a man wearing a tall white hat. Then, he became so bright that they could not see anything except a light brighter than a million candles, and then there was only white. They might have made some sound, but none of them could hear anything but the sound of absolutely nothing.

Some gathered together because they did not want to die alone. A boy and a girl lay in white sheets, naked. Presently, he got up and walked to another room, and sat in front of a round window full of bubbly glass. She did not. In another room, a boy took off his glasses and stopped trying to read because the words were too blurry. He dropped the book but it made no sound.

The last woman was barely more than a dark slip of a girl, but nobody knew that she was the last woman anyway. She had beautiful, liquid dark eyes and curly black hair, and in between her fingers she was almost black. She stood wearing a white dress, rubbing her hands over her bony shoulders, and when a blonde-haired boy came, she kissed him, a gentle, almost drunken kiss. She saw his lips move but could hear nothing except the sound of the static in her head.

It seemed the world had become a giant white house which no-one could get in focus. The yellow boy walked through the rooms of the house and found nothing but the silent and peaceful dead. It was only then that he felt panic, a cold finger which jabbed him in the stomach and wrapped around his heart. When he found another, he called to him from across the room. They were so alike that they could have been brothers. The yellow boy asked the other boy, What is your name? but the other boy looked at him apologetically and shook his head. The yellow boy knew he could not hear.

They walked together in goldenness through the white house and found no others, and they became tired.

When the world had ended, there was nothing left for them to do anyway except sit and wait for the slow crawl of the minutes and seconds and nanoseconds that marked the passage of their lives to stop. The feeling was of a room full of sunlight, and a blurriness that would not abate, as though they were nearsighted and had taken off their glasses. But perhaps they had; perhaps the sharp focus of the real world was false, and this--soft, blurry, warm, slightly off-balance--was what was really real.

He lay near a window, almost asleep in an unreal wash of sunlight, and curled and uncurled his fingers, over and over again, beckoning.

The other boy came slowly and tiredly, a gentle tiredness that slowed and blurred him. The room was very white now, and the two lay together near the window and watched the sun as it rose and drenched everything in an unbelievable brightness, and then they went to sleep.