And in his fury, he brought everything to an end. All the futures we feared, all the possibilities we imagined—he caused them all to be.

I looked and saw planets moving, strange and terrible colors in the sky. Beings of flesh and beings of stone. Eyes no one should behold. On the streets, the signs were different—nothing advertised, no jolly news. A yellow post read, “We are not alone.” Another warned, “Time has run out!”

I saw people—lost, confused. Children with no parents, clinging to a crying toddler. To be born into this world was a curse. What could they have done to deserve this? I saw the old ones lying in corners, closing their eyes. But death wouldn’t come. No one would escape what was coming. We were all bound to witness what came next.

Some prayed, some chanted. Some burned, and others burned them in sacrifice. Where is your god, I wondered. Don’t answer that. He probably did this to you.

Our leader stood surrounded by trembling guards. Their weapons were as impotent as the man they guarded. There would be no one to lead now; today, we were all the same, facing the same fate.

I must have been married. The ring on my finger was proof of that. But why couldn’t I remember? Did I have children? Was that little girl looking at me funny? Where were my parents? Why didn’t it matter? I looked once more at the sky, or whatever my mind called this lobotomized nightmare. Where were my friends? Where were the people I loved? Perhaps they were dead, bless their souls. Perhaps they were spared this apocalypse.

Did we do this? Was this the consequence of something? Who could we blame? What could we possibly have done to deserve this?

I could see my fingers, but I couldn’t feel them. Ash drifted in the air, as if a volcano had whispered its secrets to the sky. Oh, we were terrible people, consumed by endless want, careless of consequence. But in the faces of all around me, I saw no “white” or “brown”—the ash had made us one race. I didn’t see a scientist or a Nobel laureate. That man could’ve been a terrorist, and the woman behind him, a singer. That boy had the look of a child with an absent father—maybe a doctor? In every face, I saw the same question: Who was responsible for this?

What would you do if you found out? I wondered. Would you spend your last moments railing at a dying man? Were we truly that vain?

I looked at the faces—were these the faces of good people? Where were the terrorists, the criminals, the killers, the rapists? Where were those we had labeled as mad? I couldn’t tell one frightened face from the next. Slack-jawed and lost, we stood as one people, stripped of the differences that had mattered only yesterday.