The things inside the end of the world

We're all of us mere surfaces over structures. Our bodies as well as our personas. Skin, politeness, the reflection of incident light. We mistake these superficialities for realities. No wonder the things inside became jealous, wanted to share the limelight.

From where I sit the bone-tide is only a few hundred metres away. The sky over it is also bone-coloured, darker, like old ivory. It hungrily sucks the air to it.

Might air have bones too?

Splinters of bone jut from every surface that the bone-tide has touched: rigid explosions of jagged material, fractally sharp, as painful to touch as it is even to look at, or think about.

There are people there amid the spears and pickets of bone. They remind me of cordyceps caterpillars, far gone in parasitic submission to the fungus that has turned their bodies into fruits. Bones erupt from their skins, eyes, fingernails. It looks painful. But they are as immovable as everything else over there. Their skins are bone. So is their hair, and clothes, and mobile phones. Their suffering, if they are still capable of anything at all, is as passive as it is eternal.

The tide is moving. The keys under my fingers are becoming prickly. Sharp. I can feel my bones ache, desperate to be free.

It won't be long now.