Cessations

On February 12th, 2022, the world began to end. It was a Saturday, specifically 10:58 PM Eastern time. Most people would say it began on the 13th, but that’s just because they didn’t notice that, on that Saturday night, an undiscovered species of frog previously located in the Pacific Northwest disappeared. It was rather like the Oregon spotted frog, except it was less spotty and more stripey, and — Ah well. It’s gone anyway.
On the morning of February 13th, Amy Ren woke up. It was a Sunday, she realized once she was awake enough to appreciate the fact. No need to go to work. No need to get out of bed at all, really, but she did so anyway more out of habit than anything else. Breakfast was instant oats and tea steeped a few minutes too long, but she didn’t mind.
“Amy?” a voice croaked from the other room. “Amy, come look at the TV. Something’s gone wrong with the roads!”
She sighed, and gave the oatmeal a few final stirs before heading into the living room. Her grandmother leaned back in a years-worn recliner. The TV, an old thing before Amy’s time, showed footage of an intersection a few miles outside town. The road itself was fine, nothing of note there, but the stop-sign seemed to be hovering in midair, the pole it ought to have been standing on absent. The camera cut to several different signs all displaying the same rather unusual lack of a pole and defiance of gravity: speed limit signs, yield signs, interstate exit signs, all the same.
Then it cut to the newsman, a neatly-dressed thirty-something who didn’t seem at all concerned over the recent breaking of universal laws. “According to international sources, this seems to be a global occurrence. That’s right folks, street signposts all over the world have disappeared, though the signs themselves remain in place. We have yet to confirm why, but government officials have issued the following statement: ‘It’s really not that big of a deal, it’s just a few metal poles.’ Stay tuned for updates.”
Amy took a slow sip. “Huh.” she said, after a short while.
Her grandmother looked up with mild concern. “You’ll be able to get yourself to work tomorrow, won’t you?”
She thought about it, and shrugged. “I mean, the roads are still there.”
After breakfast she showered and got herself dressed, when her grandma called her name once again. “Amy, would you be a dear and get the batteries out of the basement? I think the TV remote died."
She shouted a confirmation down the hall and went to the basement, but all she found was an empty box of AAs and an unopened pack of 9 volts that’d been gathering dust long before she moved in. Who even used those things, really? It’s always AAs and AAAs. She didn’t even think they had anything requiring 9 volts in the house.
“We’re out!” she called.
Her grandma shouted back after a brief pause. “Did you check the box of old electronics on the shelf? The one with the 9 volts in it?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you check the little baggie of batteries next to the box?”
The bag was gone. Sure, there was a small pile of various dead batteries on the shelf, but the plastic sandwich bag they had been in was gone.
“That’s where we keep the dead batteries.”
“Did you check?” her grandma called back.
Amy searched over the other shelves to see if the baggie had gone elsewhere, but it was nowhere to be found. “Yeah, no AAs.” She went back upstairs to the kitchen and checked the drawer where they kept the ziplock bags. The smaller snack bags were there, as were the larger bags, but the medium-sized sandwich bags were nowhere to be found. The box was still there, though.
“Going out. Shopping.” She announced, and walked out to the driveway. Her car looked intact from the exterior at least, and she hoped nothing too important was missing under the hood. Getting in, she realized that the rear windshield was gone, as was the lever that triggered the windshield wipers. It was a clear day, she thought, so it would probably be fine. Or maybe rain had just disappeared as well.
The drive went smoothly, all things considered. It was fifteen-ish minutes to the store, and though nothing important vanished out of her car, the radio stopped working halfway through, and not even static remained. The poles of the street signs were still gone, as were the poles of the stoplights, which seemed a more recent development. The lights were still there, of course, as were the leaves of vanished trees that swayed in the breeze as if they were still attached to their branches. Where a forest once stood, the ground was perfectly smooth. Not even bare ground remained where the trees had once dug their roots, and the land was covered in grass as if it had always been. And yet the leaves still hung suspended, forgetting they were supposed to fall, forgetting gravity like the stop-signs had.
The parking lot was fairly full when she got there, and it took her a minute to find a spot. When she got out of her car and looked behind her at the road, the painted stripes down the middle of it had disappeared, leaving bare asphalt behind, plain as the day it was poured. As she walked up to the store she glanced around at the other cars. All of them were missing the rear windshields, and several had missing tags. Maybe a state had up and vanished like the ziplock sandwich bags or trees. Did the people vanish too? Was there a small chunk of earth’s mantle exposed now that the crust above had ceased to exist? That could have a major impact on the interstate system, she imagined. Then she came across a car that was missing its top entirely. Perhaps it used to be a convertible. Another lot had no car in it at all, but instead a few bags of groceries on the ground. A pool of brown liquid spread itself across the ground and one of those plastic things with the six rings that turtles get their heads stuck in sat in the middle of it, but there were no cans to be seen.
The inside of the store was a very organized mess. That is to say, the messes were localized to their specific aisles, and orderly in their own way. The paper bags containing flour and sugar and such had called it quits, leaving powdery dunes on the shelves and on the floor beneath them, but such mess didn’t extent into the next aisle over, where instead the floor was flooded with soft drinks that used to be in cans, while their bottled compatriots waited patiently for their own time on the shelves above. Glass or plastic bottles, which would go first? Or maybe it wasn’t the material that mattered so much as the form it took, and they would leave reality hand in hand, spilling their contents like their metal counterparts.
Other parts of the store were more intact. Office supplies were almost untouched, save the boxes of thumbtacks that were hollow when she shook them. Wireless keyboards and SD cards had vanished, but the electronics aisles were otherwise in good order. AA batteries had miraculously stayed in the mortal coil for the time being, and she put three boxes of them in her basket, which she gripped as if it might disappear at any time. As if her grip would stop it from doing so.
The other store-goers were in varied states. Some were barefoot and others were shirtless. Why, Amy wondered, did flip-flops and polos quit this plane while sandals and t-shirts remained? Why did metal necklace chains stand their ground while polyester cords left without a trace? An entire set of clothes sat in a pile in front of the register. Dismissing it from her mind, she set the boxes of batteries by the register.
“I’m pretty sure these used to be $5.99, but the tag was gone.”
The cashier wasn’t wearing a vest as cashiers generally did, but she assumed it had disappeared earlier in the day. “Scanner’s gone, so I’ll just take your word for it.”
Amy reached for her wallet, which was still there, and looked for her debit card, which wasn’t. “Cash work?”
“As long as it’s not fives.”
She fished around and pulled out a ten and two ones. “Fuck.”
“Oh, just take them. With my luck, cash registers’ll be the next thing to go.” He shrugged. “There probably won’t be much need for stores soon, anyway.”
“True,” she said. “Good luck with…” she gestured vaguely. “Y’know.”
“Yeah, you too.”
She nodded and left. Out in the parking lot, a few things had changed. First off, minivans had ceased to exist. A few people were milling about, looking for things that no longer were. Second, the road had vanished. Driveways and parking lots were still a thing, sure, but the way back home wasn’t.
The sky was clear, and Amy wasn’t sure if clouds had ceased to exist while she wasn’t looking or if it was just that kind of day. She held the bag of batteries with a loose hand, slowly swinging it like a pendulum.
“Well.” She said to nobody in particular.
The polyethylene of the bag rustled in the slight breeze. Some vague, indeterminable background noise fell silent, and didn’t start up again. She hadn’t even realized it was there, nor that it was now gone, but now the world felt a little quieter.
She walked back to her car, taking her time to look around. A man swore as his car key vanished on the ring. A dog was barking. Her car was, at least from an outside perspective, still intact. It didn’t really matter, she thought. The thing wasn’t exactly built for off-roading, not for the nearly eleven miles back home, and she didn’t really feel like walking. By the time she got back, the TV remote probably would have vanished. Maybe her grandma, too.
With no intention or means of going home, Amy set to wandering downtown. She tried to watch a movie at the local theater, but something in the projector stopped working halfway through. Such was the case with most things downtown. The bowling alley staff all just walked out when the pins disappeared, and most restaurants were at a loss when the stoves up and left. By the time the power went out, nobody really noticed.
The time passed as it usually did, and by the time the night rolled around, it was the most beautiful night she’d ever seen. There was no light pollution whatsoever, the sky was as clear as it could be, and there at the end of the world, the universe laid bare all its splendor to Amy on the mainstreet of some nowhere town in the Midwest.
Amy blinked, and the sky was emptier than it had been a moment before. A few less stars, here and there. It was as if someone had taken a dry erase marker to the constellations, and haphazardly rubbed them away. Maybe they were vanishing based on spectral class, or maybe those parts of the universe were just unlucky. She remembered that the light delay from the sun to Earth was a little over eight minutes. She almost checked her watch, then remembered it was gone, so she just closed her eyes.
A few minutes later, she opened them. If the sun had vanished, it would’ve caused a ripple through spacetime that’d send the Earth careening off into the void. But that hadn’t happened, as far as she could tell, and some of the stars were still up there. And although Amy couldn’t see it, so was hers, for now.