I. Giles
The apartment is empty now. The art is gone, the faded old couch with its forgotten etymology is gone, and so too is the battered old television that gave a man who loved the same sex so much nostalgia. The cats have moved on. They live across the hall now, with a group of people that do not know the story their master was part of, who do not have that special spark in them of having been part of it. They live outside now, hunting mice and birds in a grey jungle. Some do not live at all, and their husks feed those same mice and birds their cohorts prey upon.
The man is gone, and he has taken his knowledge of it with him. In his stead, some other man will live, with different art, different animals, a better couch and a new television. Perhaps this new man will have cats, or maybe dogs. It is likely he will not love other men. All of these new factors can never again have that rare combination that smelled so deeply of it. Neither will this new man, for without this fated blending, how can he know that it ever happened?
The story fades from the apartment, gone forevermore.
II. Dmitri
The laboratory is empty now. The tools are gone, and the water that filled tank after tank has gone with them. The smoke that plumed the ceiling and walls in grey feathers is gone. No more does it hiss. The scientists have moved on. They go home to their wives now, the aeon-old object of their fascination having taken flight as well. One will never see his home. Nor will he ever see the laboratory so open with all the things that have left it. Along with the light of his eyes and the good of his heart Death takes his knowledge of it. Death hoards these things, for such a perfect story that this latest meal was part of must be protected. But, in time, even Death will forget it, as all things do. In the place of the scientist, another will come. He will study different things. Perhaps he will lie to different people for different reasons, perhaps he will not lie at all. But he will never lie or study or care as his predecessor did. The price of this deviation is knowledge of it. The second scientist surrenders ever learning the story the first was part of.
But, this capitulation does not hurt him. He has never known it to begin with.
The story fades from the laboratory, gone forevermore.
III. Strickland
The office is empty now. The candies are gone, the cameras set in the wall silent and dim. No longer does the clicking of a typewriter or of pain pills on teeth fill the room. One of these realities is brought about simply enough. The secretary has gone home. Now that it has vanished from the earth and all who knew it are gone, there is nothing for her to type. The other actuality arose from it. He, the colonel, had a great, titanic part to play in it, the most important, most critical role of all the players in all the story. He is the catalyst Destiny deemed him worthy to play his part into his grave, for it to be as it should. In time, a different colonel will pace this office, put his shoes on this desk. If fate has a heart ( it does not, or it would still be remembered), this new colonel will be an improvement on the old. He will not shout or hit or lust. But, we can never know what comes next. Perhaps the next colonel will make the first look like Christ himself. Time is random and jagged. Time is an impatient lover. It marches onward, with or without it.
The story fades from the office, gone forevermore.
IV. Zelda
The house is empty now. The armchair is gone. The titillating waves of scent and taste are gone. They have left, uprooted and moved so far away that they reach no nostrils. The stress of knowing what it was, of being realistic enough to know what part she'd played in the story, banished the one who'd made them from the house. But, when she takes her mouth-watering sensory input, and the armchair that had been the throne of her demagogue for such a long millenia, she also takes the attrition. The fights, the envy and hatred and worn hands. Perhaps then, the death of it, of that story, was a good thing? Perhaps the downfall of it made a better world for one of its players. Where the bubbles of grease and crackling oil have been transplanted, so has the trench warfare that the house had come to know so well. In time, even these familiar things would no longer reek of it. The hurt has not been stitched, it has been numbed. Soon even the house will forget that hurt, as it forgets it. It will welcome new tenants, with new hurts and new smells and tangs. These hurts will drug it, as these flavors will intoxicate it in the memory of players, of cast members in that story. But they will be fleeting, and shorter, and less vivid, each time. These new tenants have no knowledge of it, no connection. Their substances are counterfeit. They are not it.
The story fades from the house, gone forevermore.
V. Elisa
The apartment is empty now. The signs are gone. The bathtub is dry, like the cracked puffy eyes of someone who cries. The timer is silent, never again to sound its guns, not for pleasure or routine. The red heels are empty, bright and shiny, tear-streaked for their newness. The woman who so brightly employed these things is gone as well. Her absence is the bloodiest hole, the widest chasm. She was the soul of it. It was she who gave it life, and with her fading from the world so did it. She is the final damning and the first. In her place, a different woman will rise. She is so alien, so terribly unwelcome in the space where it was born. She is unable to mutate into a facet of it. The story will reject her even in death. Even it must bow to time. She will triumph in the end. Where signs are so desperately sought after, words will be. The bathtub will fill, not for pleasure or routine. Gradually time will regard her in higher fashion than the woman who came before her, who had no words. The world will bend and follow suit. Perhaps she will be outgoing, perhaps she will cower before the undeniability of others. Perhaps she will harden her heart to the masses outside, so opposite of her predecessor. Time forgets the woman who came before, who birthed it, who began that perfect story that Death itself lusts for.
The story fades from the apartment, gone forevermore.
VI. The Shape Of Water
The dock is empty now. The rain is gone. The friendly divets and pits in the concrete have been paved. The surface is unknowable, unremembered, a lying husband. That is because the child of it, the begotten spawn of the story, the bond it forged, have left this place. The space they dwell in is a million times the senior of the dock. While the jungle above it grows, the dock is left to shrink, to shrivel and burn into dust. Perhaps they have forgotten it in its ruin. Perhaps they yearn like starving lepers to return but cannot reach back to that moment, that grain of temporal sand. That grain contains it, the highlight and climax and eventual entropic end of it. They suppose this is why the story dies. They cannot find it. Now that the world has forgotten them and all of those other parts to play in the story are replaced, the world is equally cut off from it. They are the last. It birthed them, birthed their love, and now they are the only ones that hold the code to recreate it within them. After them, no more of it. No more story. Gradually, as time lengthens and discombobulates them with their love, they forget the world too. Time's reach is slowed down here, and the land where they lay is trapped in a cone of stasis. It is a lulling rhythm, and a calming one too, to walk the same places for eternity. There will be no new spawn here, no new love or bond. The world forgets it but bears it no malice. To replace this finish to the story is an insult.
As the jungles grow, and music fades, and the planet shrinks, and tyrants fall, and young boys die, and people hate, and it stays only with them, only with them . . .
The story fades from the world, gone forevermore.
