Fade to Black
As Joan Girardi stood and watched Ryan Hunter retreat, clouds began to gather in the Arcadian sky. They were sinister, black things, the type of clouds that make newscasters cut into TV programs and students hide under their desks, but there was no time for any of that to happen. Within a single second, the rain drops begin to fall.
Casually, Joan moved to brush the drop of her hand and nearly screamed at what she saw. The rain was not normal water but rather a thick, black substance, more like oil or ink. As she watched, the rainfall quickened, covering her in a sheath of black. And then, just like that, Joan Girardi disappeared.
It spread outward from Joan, looping over handrails and climbing up trees. It devoured the posters that lined the walls and ate up the papers still scattered on the ground. It moved through walls and under doors, coating everything it touched with the same black. Gone was the artwork that sat on Helen's desk, waiting for a grade. Gone was Joan's AP Physics book, sitting forlornly on her desk. Gone were the bumper sticks that covered Grace's locker and Clay's CDs. Gone was Arcadia High and all its students, too.
The goo moved along the streets with a similar viciousness, obliterating everything its path. It snaked up buildings, lamp posts, and television poles. It took in the coffee house where Lily sat and the desk where Kevin worked, his latest article still undone. It devoured Sky Light books, eating away at poetry and prose alike. It ran through the ground and covered what it found, bodies of bunny rabbits, teenage girls, and little boys. It tracked down Will, filing paper work at his desk, and invited itself in the Girardi home, blanketing the brilliant blue and gold of the kitchen when the same dull, lifeless black that now blanketed their world.
Everything and everybody merged together in a sea of black, unidentifiable in their sameness, no longer existing in their lives. It seemed so desolate, as though in one fell swoop the world had been destroyed. It seemed that not only was everything was gone forever but that it had simply never been there to begin with.
When the goo hit God, however, everything changed. He did not succumb to same bleak fate as the world around Him. Rather, He changed into something unknown to human eyes, something that all the worlds on heaven and on earth could not describe. And by the light of Him, one could just barely make out millions of ripples moving through the pond of black, reaching out far beyond what the human eye could ever hope to see or the human mind could ever comprehend. The ripples never ended and never stopped, continuing forever as the testament to the world covered in black.
Thank you, Joan of Arcadia. I did not own you, and I do not still, but I'll miss you. Thanks for the ripples.