A low-grade hum from outside brings you back from your thoughts of leaving. You run to ask your wife if she heard the noise. But she’s not in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. Nor are the kids. You phone her sister, see if your wife showed up there. The line’s down, but you listen to the waves of static, trying to decipher a pattern. You think you can make out a series of coordinates: 53.6458° N, 1.7850° W. An old colleague would call this pareidolia. You call it a sign. You return to the kitchen table. Bowls of cornflakes sit uneaten. The flakes have dissolved in the now pale-orange milk. You sniff one bowl, then dip a finger and taste the sour tang of the milk. How long have they been gone? You try to remember the last time you saw them. It felt like a moment ago. But their names have faded. Their faces appear gauzy in your mind. And your wife? Or was it ex-wife? She never liked cornflakes. Or you. Or your job at the Institute. Or the hours you spent away from the family. And maybe that’s why you had thoughts of leaving, of simplifying the way you live. Maybe she had similar thoughts and took the kids. Maybe to those coordinates. You hurry to your office upstairs and dig out a map, unfurling it on your desk. You hunch over the map, trying to locate those coordinates. The paper is thin and white, washed out. There are no features on this landscape: no cities or towns or villages, no mountains or hills or lakes or rivers. You can’t even find your childhood home or the cemetery where your parents are buried. You can’t recall any memories of your mother and father. You wish you could. You imagine they are good people. Better than you, a forgetful soul. If only you could remember the name of that old colleague—he was a geographer or land surveyor, something like that—he could solve this mystery. You hold the map up to the bright light in the window. The paper turns to ash and snows down around you. You enjoy the dance of the motes and you laugh, wishing your wife and kids were here. You wish you could have shown them a lot of things: that holiday in the far north and the aurora borealis, that you were a good father. You head back downstairs and search the kitchen for clues. Dust covers everything. You’re sure it wasn’t there before. A fine layer of this brown particulate matter dulls every surface. Around the table sit three dust piles in line with the bowls. Your wife wouldn’t like all this mess. You fetch the dustpan and brush and sweep up the dust. Then, you empty the pan in the sink and turn on the taps, hoping the water washes away this blight. The water runs red and dark and feels warm to the touch. It soon fills the sink and overflows onto the floor. Sulfurous fumes rise into the air. You step away, unsure of what to do. Your family must have gone outside, you reason, and you make your way to the hallway. You shout approximations of your kids’ names, sounds really, primeval noises unrelated to language. There’s no reply. No sound at all. You grasp the stiff handle of the front door and force it to turn. The door sparks open. You step into the world, what’s left of it, a white squall of nothing. You stumble around, blinded, no clue about those coordinates. You fall to your knees, then to the whitened ground. You look skyward. Bursts of electric green light flicker and spiral across the heavens, and you call out for your wife and kids to join you. 

Then, you shut your eyes and wait.

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Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014).