I picked up the frame, brushing away broken glass and bits of stone from the picture. I didn’t recognize the smiling couple in the photo. I didn’t recognize the house, either. It must have been beautiful once, before the event. Now it was just another pile of forgotten rubble, swallowed by time. I can’t remember how we came to be here, but here we were.

In the far corner of the hallway, past the scorched, frayed red carpet, my family, what was left of it, sat in close conversation. We’d have to move soon; there was danger coming, though what sort, I couldn’t say. For now, we were safe, sheltering in a hollowed-out reminder of a life none of us could remember.

We still didn’t know what happened. No one knew. Phones were dead, the internet finally gone. Who could imagine a world without Google? Without that shared tether to knowledge and certainty? We couldn’t understand what had happened, but we could see clearly what it had caused.

Something was falling in the sky. A massive, dark shadow hanging there, blocking out everything else. No matter where you looked, there it was, falling inescapably. I couldn’t remember a time before it appeared—a silent promise of destruction. Hello, ant, meet boot.

We tried to explain it at first. But when gravity stopped obeying its laws, science lost its authority. The tall buildings were the first to go. Shattered metal and broken stone floated in the sky like constellations, falling so slowly you’d swear they weren’t moving. Yet if you closed your eyes, somehow, they’d be closer when you looked again.

I wish we hadn’t reached so far. If we hadn’t taken anything up, there’d be nothing to come down. I wondered if the people in that airplane I could see now through the broken, slowly falling roof were still alive, knowing they’d eventually hit the ground. I imagined the terror—trapped, suspended in time, waiting for the impact.

The world around us had become a place of suspended dread, a cruel cosmic joke. Things would fall slowly until the very last second, then slam into the earth with all the violence of unchecked gravity. The bodies of those caught in the first wave lay as a bloody testament to this twisted new law. We learned quickly. We learned real quick. The slow descent was a lie—a lie told by something, or someone, so angry, so malicious. We were meant to watch our end inch closer, helpless to escape it.

We tried to act normal. Told ourselves that someone, somewhere, would figure it out. It had to be something explainable. Some scientist would emerge to reassure us, to tell us it would all be over soon. But no one figured it out. No one explained. Silence became our final answer.

I drove toward Liberty Junction, where my friends were stranded. It was a nice car—a sleek thing I could never have afforded, except for the chaos that had destroyed its fleeing owner. The roads were littered with abandoned cars, though few still had fuel. As I drove, I saw people jumping off the bridge. A line of bodies, one after another, diving into the void. I guess that was one way to go. But I couldn’t bring myself to take my own life. There was something too final about it, something that felt like giving in. I would endure, even if just a little longer.

When I reached the junction, I saw my friends sitting on the hood of a car. They waved when they saw me, a fleeting glimpse of joy in their eyes—the kind of happiness you feel in the face of impossible odds. I parked beside them, and we exchanged the kind of looks that said everything words couldn’t.

The sky was darker now, the shadow much closer. Did it fall faster? It was the size of a planet, I realized. The longer I stared, the more certain I became... it was a planet. A planet was falling on us, a great cosmic weight pressing down. We had no choice but to keep looking. I began to understand, slowly, that our gaze somehow slowed its descent. When we stopped looking, it fell faster.

So we looked to the sky, from where our death was coming. We would force even those who had given up to look, because we didn’t want to die. We’d found something to do, however small. We could stare down the end and, perhaps, if we stared hard enough, we’d see tomorrow.

So I sat with my friends, and we looked at the sky, hoping for even one more day—a day before the end of the world.