When the sky learned to breathe backwards....

the being arrived at noon on a Tuesday descending not in fire or light but as a smell a cloying sweet odor like fruit left to rot in a sunless room people noticed it first on their tongues tasting spoiled sugar where there should have been nothing at all then they saw it a hole in the sky that wasn't a hole at all but a tear from ra at the edges from it poured something that resembled a being its body a flowing mess of hands soft and unformed like Wax melting in Reverse where its face might have

been there was only an undulating mouth vast and sighing as if perpetually disappointed in something it couldn't quite name the world fell silent as the being began to speak though no sound was made its words carved themselves into the minds of everything that had ears to hear or Hearts to fear people tried to scream but the air would not carry their cries the being drifted lower its form reshaping itself to something worse something almost familiar a hundred versions of the same stranger's face blinked in unison across its shifting body each one whispered it's time to

fall apart and things did the loss of nature didn't shatter they simply stopped holding up their end of the bargain people felt their skin slip from them politely painlessly building slumped as though sighing with relief at finally collapsing under their own weight a flock of birds hung in the air Unsure how to fall until they decided to dissolve into droplets of ink instead the being wept then its tears rolling upward they hung in the sky black and vast as oceans and inside each drop something looked out curious and hungry as though seeing this place for

the very first time a child unafraid approached the being's coiling Mass are you a God she asked the many mouths of the being widened into grins that never quite reached their edges is no little speck I'm the kindness that comes when all the stories are too tired to continue I am the hand that untangles the knot the child nodded as though this made perfect sense around her the world unspooled trees became strings of green light Rivers folded into ribbons of shimmering silk people's memories crumbled into flakes of gold that floated sky word and vanished and

yet it did not feel like destruction it felt like exhalation like a great Collective breath let out after holding it for too many Millennia when nothing was left but the child and the being the child took its hand waxing soft and infinite and whispered will we dream the being's mouths curved into something neither smile nor frown you already are and with that the tear in the sky closed sealing silence behind it as if there had never been a world at all