There wasn’t anything particularly different on the day the world ended. Work sucked, I skipped lunch again, and I had a gym session later that evening. It was on my way to the gym that I noticed the skyline. It was white and approaching rapidly.

  It looked like dawn, but I could clearly see the setting sun in the west.

  It was approaching faster, clearing out the colors in the sky. Then the buildings off in the distance, erasing everything.

  I didn’t know what was happening. Before I knew it, my legs were already running in an opposite direction. Feet pounding the asphalt. The wind pulled at me, almost being sucked into the opposite direction.

  Something primal had taken over, a baser instinct for others as well. None of us could reason what we were seeing. Skyscrapers faded into this white light. Now all around us.

  But then the screaming came. A cry that wasn’t pain. A sound I didn’t even know a person could make. The kind that haunted dreams.

  I looked to see where it came from. There was a lady, eyes bleeding as her mouth hung agape.

  I felt my ears beating with the rush of blood. My vision tunneling. Another scream. A man now, closer and somehow worse. “Don’t look up,” I kept telling myself. Another, and another. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was as if all the air in the world was gone, thinned away.

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  I dropped to my knees. My head swam. The sound beat of my heart in my ears, only slightly interrupted by more howling screams.

  The tunneling of my vision swam with stars. My legs collapsed, and I felt the cold, hard ground.

  I had to know. I looked up. It was as if the sky was falling, folding all light and existence in on itself. I felt hot liquid leak out of my eyes, ears, and nose. The light was nearly upon me, upon us. Like a mighty hand, crushing all creation.

  Twisting, turning, spinning, smashing, threatening, thrashing, thinning, threshing. It was all coming down, all the heavens, all the skies, covering me, covering us. It was whispering, folding in—breaking us. Ending us.

  I couldn’t—we couldn’t—see. The sky was falling on our heads. My head, our head, the dark swirling, the stars. How beautiful they were, we were. The rush of blood in my ears. How holy.

  The hells were roaring up from the ends, tearing their hate free. No place for it to go. It passed through us. They had forgotten us. The lowest and the highest would have forgotten us.

  Where had they gone? Where had we gone? The stars swam, tunneling forward. They lead us. They showed us the new way. The mighty hand made us. It brought us. It unbound us, it unblinded us, it was… too much. It was all that we ever needed, and it called to us. It made us hunger for more.

  We were more, not alone but together, we followed the stars away from that hand, inward deeper. We devoured, unraveled, tore apart, and ingurgitated.

  We weren’t enough. We were never enough. Torn apart, devoured, and integrated.

  Only then, we would find… we would find what would make us enough. We would continue. We would eat.

  Then we would be whole.