And so you continue in this world where you are the only moving, changing thing. The sky stretches blue-on-blue, the stormclouds paralyzed the moment before bursting, patches of sky all the more vivid for the contrast. Trees are frozen jerked to one side by the wind, and the cars on the street have been empty for as long as you can remember.

There are birds and strays and other creeping things hovering in contrived positions, the last moment before all existence ceased to move, ceased to connect. Casualty shattered, time is gone, all that remains is the multi-dimensional screenshot of the millisecond before severance.

Nothing moves in this frozen world, except for you. You’ve picked your way across the city in the time since this moment, this second, this existence you only thought was dreary before, was aborted from the flow of All. There is no temperature, there is no wind, there is no noise–there is only the last moment, an island of existence suspended in nothing forevermore.

There is no body connected to the you that watches the empty cars, the wind-tossed trees, the storm clouds that may once have had the capacity for rupture. There is no physicality and you wonder if there are other consciousnesses observing the same things you are. You wonder if you pass by and through one another, unaware. You wonder if this is Hell.

You walk the island of the last moment this place was connected to anything else, wondering if you are even alive. If you ever were. If you were once one of the human people that walked this street, smelled the smog of the city, tasted the wind on the breeze. Why are there no humans in this panorama? Why only animals and bugs, why only plants, why only the multitude of evidence that humans once existed? That everything here once existed?

There is only one thing here: the snapshot. An island of life, biopsied, frozen forevermore. And you are, as far as you can tell, the sole resident.

Daily Spur: Islander