The sun still seemed to move behind the glassy heavens sometimes, searching bleakly through the blue as if it, too, had lost something it couldn’t give up on trying to find again.
Returning again and again. They squinted at it in camaraderie, and it departed abruptly, as if offended.
Plunging the world never into darkness. The blue had its own starkly visible absence, night banished, as well, beyond its borders. What remained was a perpetual twilight that turned their skin to the colour of steel, the lagoons to still sheets of silver and the trees that blossomed from them to the red-bruised-black of dried blood.
Not bare branches miming cracks against the glassy heavens, but thick fronds bowing beneath their own weight. Were they trees at all? They ended where the sky began, splaying across it in black, matted webs. They grew too far from any shore to touch, and the lagoons didn’t promise convincingly to be water if they tried to swim.
Red-black and lying silver and blue. There had been green there once, and convincing trees. For the life of them, they couldn’t remember what had caused the change, any more than they could remember what was precious enough to keep them searching when surely-
Surely-
-they could have left if they’d wanted to. Everyone else must have. There was no one else there, after all, and there had been before. Where that lagoon lay, just there, ahead, had been a house. A woman and her two children had lived where a tree stunted by its three branches now failed to reach the closed, glassy, suffocating sky.
