Imagine yourself as the last man on earth

No one left behind, no cure for cancer, plague or stupidity. You finger the air, but there is no breeze. Out upon a desert white as snow you see a mirage. A few dancers grappling arms and tangled legs and a floor of oak, polished and pale. The dance is old, the dance leaves you alone after a while. This too shall pass, the saying goes. This too, and this too, et al. It is the second day of ... Water. Rain. The unapproachable clouds high overhead, with a few scattered beams of light coming down. Nothing. No response from the ground as day becomes dark, as the darkness consumes all color, all sight. Everything you might hope, or dream, or believe within the limit of faith, falls down. In your inner sanctum, the secret space where memory plays, you wear a disguise and drift through a crowd from lesser days, among lesser souls. Their speech fills a room, then a hall, then bursts forth as a wail. Imagine. Me without you. You without a word. Dialogue which fails. If only you could film the silence that surrounds each of us, now gone, and the clouds, and the air, and the invisible blue spirit that is ... On the third day you rise. Partly to smell what can be smelled, partly to relieve your body of its fouls. Of this gift, you pray let it end today. Your sounds echo in the haze, slipping away like waves upon the beach. No mercy. No dream. No peace. The angels breathe in the stillness of your voice.