text: An Hour The bird on the wall squawked once. It had flung itself into the stagnant air for a moment, pausing only long enough to cry its chord, then vanished into its nest once more. It fell silent. Everything was silent. The hallways were silent, no longer begging for the soft steps for which they had once longed. The door frame was cut and marked to varying degrees, with names and numbers scrawled in caring script. The kitchen was calm, the measured dripping of the faucet's tears had long since dried into apathy. The living room lacked its own eponymous nature, its couches and chairs tired and layered in heavy, gray lethargy. Out front, the pumps were dry and thirsty, pleading for a drink, a drink inevitably denied by the cracked dirt of the stone well. An old wooden bucket, moldy with maturity, lay still and silent, in mimicry of the world it knew. The house was empty. The silence broke all at once, and rain fell swiftly, sure and confident the land it softened would give no resistance. The land had long since been claimed by the rain and had resigned itself to its domain. As the rain descended, the sun melted away, unable to compete with the storm. A once great entity reduced to flaming rubble on the horizon, still emitting light, faintly, however unnecessary light happened to be. It would have been hard to breathe, the trees had long since been uprooted or toppled. They no longer had the will to breathe life into the world, and the world too was too weary to sustain it. And thus the trees fell, and with them, the world held its breath. The cracked dirt drank quickly, and cried, parched for more. The thirst was unquenchable, the more there was, the less it seemed. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the Earth tried to cry, but the tears refused to flow. It feared the rain had forever ended, as it had once breathed in excess, now it craved the winds cool embrace. The sun shone again. This time brighter than before. Had someone cared to look, a wooden clock shaped like a house could be seen on the wall, preparing to sing the hour. The dry ground had since decayed and warm methane breezes would often flow, dragging along streams of blood red dust, a parade for the emptiness. A window gave out, and the dust found the inside of the house becoming desert. And then the wind gave out and the dust settled permanently in it's new home. The last wind had come, and gone, and with it, had blown the last flame in the sky. The bird cried twice in darkness.