Tuesday Morning
Apparently it was a Tuesday morning when they woke up and realised the world had ended. She rolled over next to him and asked “can you see anything out the window?”
“Ummm..I don’t think so. It’s all white.”
She got out of bed and pressed her face to the cold glass. Beads of freezing condensation were forming on the inside. Everything outside was white. Like a smooth endless fog.
It was a bit puzzling.
Why had the world chosen to end right now? Or had it happened gradually over night, when they had both been asleep? Had something or someone caused it to happen or had it just spontaneously occurred – a kind of paradoxically emergent nothingness, a seeping unbecoming?
He sat up against the pillows now, stirred by the prospect of there being nothing at all outside the window.
“Surely, if there was nothing then it would all be black not white?” he asked sleepily, rubbing his eyes.
She turned and smiled. “Well, this nothingness is white.”
“I suppose it had to be some sort of colour.”
“Black and white aren’t really colours though are they?”
“No. No, not at all.”
She stepped lightly over to the table by the bed and switched on the clock radio, idly dialling the stations. Only a gentle hiss of static: consistent, white noise.
So that’s what nothingness sounds like, she thought to herself. Not even like the sound of the sea or waves on a beach. Just an unvarying sound like rain that never stops.
There didn’t seem much more they could do at this point, so she curled back into the warm sheets in his arms that wrapped around her, and felt soft lips upon her neck.
Their feet touched.
“Maybe,” she thought, “maybe it’ll come back tomorrow? Or is it early now?”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
©Peter Morse 2004
