The Hollowing

A splitting difference—

something’s wrong.

The day feels short,

the night too long.

I see them playing

just outside,

while something in me

fractures, dies.

Their laughter drills

into my skull,

too bright, too loud,

too beautiful.

I try to speak—

my tongue won’t move.

This silence is

a quiet wound.

Their faces blur

behind the glass,

like ghosts that mock

as moments pass.

I press my hand—

it meets the cold.

This prison holds

a body old.

A name is whispered—

not my own.

I smile, but I

feel overthrown.

Strangers come

and stroke my hair.

They speak in tones

I cannot bear.

The mirror cracks—

who is she now?

A wrinkled mask,

a furrowed brow.

My thoughts slip loose

like beads unstrung.

The lullaby

has come undone.

What once was mine

is now a maze.

Familiar hallways

bend and blaze.

The doors won’t open.

Time won’t bend.

This waking dream

will never end.

I once held dolls—

their eyes were kind.

Now empty sockets

mock my mind.

The children laugh,

they do not see

the rot inside

what’s left of me.

Their world is whole—

untouched, alive.

While I forget

how to survive.

They chase the sun;

I drown in dusk,

my memories

a cloud of dust.

No longer real,

no longer known,

I rot in place

and die alone.

Each breath I take

is borrowed air—

I’m almost gone,

but still aware.

 

Whispers Through the Glass

A splitting difference,

my mind deceives—

between what’s now

and make-believes.

Children laugh

beyond the pane,

yet names escape me

once again.

A doll in hand,

a skipping rope,

their joy once mine—

a tender hope.

But now my world

is pale and gray,

the past and present

slip away.

The sun is warm

on window’s light,

but shadows stretch

within my sight.

I reach for thoughts

that twist and fade,

my memory

a ghost parade.

A tea set waits

on porcelain dreams,

a garden swing

in golden gleam.

But I am lost

in looping air,

recalling faces

that aren’t there.

They call me "Nana"—

is that me?

Their voices hum

uncertainly.

I smile to please,

though not quite sure

if they are real,

or something more.

Each day I stay,

a little less,

a slow retreat

from consciousness.

My essence thins

like morning mist,

the world I knew

no longer exists.

Yet through the glass,

life dances on—

a fleeting song,

a childhood gone.

The tether frays

but still holds tight

to dreams that flicker

out of sight.

A girl once played

where they now run,

with braided hair

and setting sun.

She whispered hopes

to winds that roam—

now lost inside

this twilight home.

So let them play

and let them be,

while I drift down

this memory sea.

Though I forget

the world’s design,

these fading thoughts

were once all mine.

 

The Last Sunset

They stood in silence.

Dozens at first. Then hundreds. Some barefoot. Some in tattered suits or melted uniforms. Families clutched each other. Loners stood apart. Their faces were hollow, cheeks dark with soot or dried tears. No one moved.

The city was burning again.

This time, there was no emergency broadcast, no helicopters, no sirens. Just the slow, deliberate rise of black smoke choking out the late sun. Orange flames licked at shattered glass towers, catching on torn banners and faded pride.

The fire moved like a tide — consuming everything left behind. A slow-motion erasure.

Some said it was sabotage. Others said it was mercy.

They all watched.

From the ridge outside the city’s edge — once a scenic overlook filled with tourists and joggers — now a refugee post, the view was perfect. Tragic and perfect.

Elias stood there too, hood up, dust clinging to the folds of his coat. Lina was beside him, her arms crossed tight.

A boy asked aloud, voice dry and cracking:

“Was it always this quiet when cities died?”

No one answered.

Behind them, supply trucks were being loaded. Maps were being redrawn in chalk. A new world, etched over the ruins of the old. But no one turned to watch that.

They were all staring at the same thing:

The death of what they used to call civilization.

Each person imagining their old life — the coffee shop they once loved, the office they hated, the tiny apartment that still held their favorite books, now ash.

It wasn’t just a city that burned.
It was every illusion that held it up.

As the last tower collapsed in on itself, a low rumble echoed over the hills.

And still… no one spoke.

 

Ashes of the Empire

The tunnel narrowed again as they walked — the rebel leading the way, Elias behind, silent. Her name, she said over her shoulder, was Lina. That’s all he got.

They emerged through a rusted hatch and climbed up a ladder that led them back into the surface world.

When Elias stepped out, his breath caught.

The city… it was barely recognizable.

Where once glass towers pierced the sky, jagged skeletons of steel remained. Buildings leaned drunkenly, windows blown out, their facades scorched black. The streets were ruptured, some split open like wounds. Weeds and wiry shrubs burst through concrete, nature's slow revenge.

A rust-covered bus lay on its side across a freeway overpass, half swallowed by a sinkhole. Billboards peeled and hung in the wind, sun-bleached and meaningless. One still read:

“Hope is a Choice.”
The rest had been defaced with red spray paint:
“HOPE DIED WITH THE GRID.”

The air smelled of rust and rot. Somewhere distant, the faint crack-crack of automatic fire echoed, but no one reacted. It was background noise now — like birdsong in a forest that forgot its name.

Down below, in what used to be a neighborhood, the outlines of burned homes remained, blackened ribs of former lives. Someone had scrawled on a wall in charcoal:

“This was my house. I loved it. I’m still here.”

Lina led Elias through a maze of alleyways, past makeshift barricades of trash and twisted rebar. Movement flickered in shadows — children in rags, elderly hunched in corners, mutts sniffing the remains of yesterday’s scavenging. Everyone wore layers, hoods, masks. No one spoke.

A drone — not one of theirs — buzzed overhead.

Everyone stopped.

No one looked up.

They just froze until the sound passed.

Then motion returned, like clockwork winding up again.

“We call this place the Ashlands now,” Lina muttered as they ducked into a warehouse, its roof missing. “Used to be called Central District. They hit it first when the riots started. Gas. Then fire. Then silence.”

Elias looked around. Inside, dozens of people milled between makeshift cots, fire barrels, a rudimentary comms station powered by car batteries. Books were stacked in corners, dry goods guarded like gold.

“This is what’s left?” he asked.

Lina didn’t answer right away. She just looked out at the horizon, where the charred skyline met a gray, dead sky.

“No,” she finally said. “This is what’s beginning.”

 

I wonder where she went

Hours pass. The light shifts—dim at first, then darker still, as the afternoon slips toward evening. The old woman remains in her chair, eyes fixed on the rain. She hasn't moved, not really. Just a slow turn of the head now and then, as if chasing a sound she can’t name or following a thought she can’t catch.

The rain has not stopped. It falls in steady streams now, tracing long, jagged paths down the glass. Each drop seems to stretch the silence, drawing time out like thread unraveling from the spool of her mind.

"That one," she whispers, watching a large droplet snake down the pane. "That one was a Christmas... I think. You had that red scarf. Or was it me?"

Another drop. Another memory, slipping free, vanishing into the blur of the glass.

"Was it snowing then?" she asks the window. "I thought it always snowed on Christmas."

Her voice carries no urgency, no sadness—just the soft resignation of someone whose world is slipping out of reach, yet who no longer fights to hold on. She blinks slowly, her eyes reflecting the watery streaks before her.

A bird lands on the windowsill for a brief moment—then flies away. She doesn’t see it.

"I had a daughter once, I think," she says suddenly. "She had freckles, like stars. She used to sit right there, on the floor, and draw suns with yellow crayons."

Her gaze falls to the empty patch of carpet near the window. There's nothing there, but for a moment her lips curl into a gentle smile. A drop of rain thuds against the glass, heavier than the others, and the smile fades.

"I wonder where she went."

Dusk bleeds into night. Lamps hum to life elsewhere in the house—set by timers long ago. The room glows gold, then orange, then dull. Still she sits, wrapped in her cardigan, a thin shawl of grey draped across her shoulders like cobwebs of time.

"Time," she murmurs. "It’s so slippery. Like... like the rain. You try to catch it, but it just—"

She lifts a trembling hand toward the window, fingers spread wide as if trying to stop a raindrop with her palm. But her hand lowers again before it reaches the glass.

"Was I ever young?" she asks aloud. "I can’t remember how it felt. The running. The dancing. I know I did, but... it’s like hearing someone else's story."

Outside, the rain turns to mist, then fog. Night presses against the window like a quiet visitor.

She sighs, her breath slow and soft.

"Each drop… a memory," she says. "Each one... gone before I can hold it."

Silence again.

And yet she stays. Watching.

As the window becomes a mirror, and her reflection a stranger.

 

The Day the City Burned

It began with a hum — low and distant, like the sound of a storm gathering far away.

People stopped in the streets. Phones hung limp in their hands. Coffee cups cooled on café tables. Traffic halted without honks or rage. It was as if time had hiccupped, and everyone felt it in their bones before their brains caught up.

From every screen — in shop windows, in palms, on massive towers looming over intersections — the news came in waves.

"Containment zones have failed."

"Emergency response withdrawn from inner sectors."

"Fires have reached the financial district."

"Do not attempt to flee the city."

Above them, in the distance, smoke curled skyward in thick black ribbons. The sun behind it turned a jaundiced yellow, as if the sky itself was sick of watching. Somewhere, alarms wailed — but they sounded tired, uninterested.

No one spoke.

A mother held her child tighter but didn’t move.

An old man, cane shaking, whispered a prayer he barely remembered.

A food courier stared up at the towers ablaze with disbelief, his insulated bag still slung across his back.

And Elias Ward — not in uniform, not yet — stood among them. Just another man in the crowd, eyes wide, unable to blink. He hadn’t yet been recruited into the UDER. He was still just a veteran on the edge of poverty, another mouth to feed, another man looking for purpose in a world that had stopped pretending to offer one.

That moment — that frozen stillness — would stay with him forever.

The quiet shock of it all.

The sense that civilization had collapsed not with a bang, but with resignation.

People had always feared fire, riots, violence.

But no one had prepared for apathy — the true virus that hollowed everything out before the flames ever touched the concrete.

The people didn’t run.

They just watched.

And the city burned.

 

Beneath the Uniform

 Elias moved slowly now, like a man walking toward a reckoning. The stench of piss and old smoke thickened as he reached the rusted service door at the end of the platform. He shouldered it open with a creak that sounded like a scream in the silence. Inside, the corridor narrowed — ancient maintenance tunnels worming deeper into the earth, untouched by even UDER's drones.

He stopped at a rusted locker bolted to the wall, half open. Inside, faded overalls, a dusty first aid kit, and a grey hoodie mottled with grime. He stared at it for a long time before he reached in and pulled it out.

It still smelled faintly of soap.

He took off the black chestplate of his UDER armor, one strap at a time, until he was bare from the waist up. His skin, pale and marked with bruises and burns, shivered in the damp air. For a moment, he just stood there — the hum of silence pressing in from all sides.

Then, slowly, he slipped the hoodie on.

It was tight across his chest, the sleeves short, but it felt real. Human. The kind of thing people wore before they had to choose sides. Before everything became armored and armored hearts.

He left the rest of the gear behind — save for his pistol, holstered low at his hip. Not for war. For survival.

The tunnel stretched ahead, lit only by the occasional emergency strip light still clinging to life. Moss clung to the walls like veins, and the air grew warmer, as if the city’s bowels were alive.

Then he saw it.

A faint glow.

Blue. Soft. Artificial.

He moved toward it cautiously, heart pounding, until the tunnel widened into a circular chamber — an old switching station long abandoned by the transit authority. But this one… had been repurposed.

Solar panels lined the curved ceiling where collapsed debris had left a hole to the sky. Someone had rerouted power through old battery banks. Clean water trickled from a pipe into a filtration drum. Crates of scavenged medical supplies and canned food lined the walls. Books. Candles. A sleeping mat.

And on one wall, scrawled in paint, large and defiant:

“WE BEGIN AGAIN. BENEATH.”

He took a step forward — his boots crunching softly on gravel.

A noise behind him.

He turned, drawing his pistol.

A young woman stood in the tunnel mouth, a rifle slung across her back, eyes narrow and fierce.

They stared at each other for a long second.

Then she said, voice low but steady, “You’re wearing a UDER belt. And a rebel’s hoodie. That means you’re either insane… or interesting.”

Elias slowly lowered the weapon.

“I’m neither,” he replied. “I’m just done pretending.”

A beat of silence.

Then she nodded toward the chamber. “You better come in. They're going to want to meet you.”