Volume 3 – Chapter 16: The Shape of Silence

Today is August 17, and there are 44 days left.

The silence had started to change its shape.

It was no more the kind one found after conversations or settled in the nighttime when everyone finally stopped pretending. It was, however, now morphing into a hollow cavernous thing, an absense echoing throughout streets, within people's eyes, through the stillness of the morning light.

Kaito stared at the ceiling of the small room he and Rika shared. Without moving, the hour passed; well, more than an hour. The fan from above spun around slowly, the rhythm mechanical as if tired, and even it had realized nothing it did anymore really mattered.

Rika was still fast asleep, breathing soft and even at his side. She had began dreaming again-he could tell by the little murmurs fired from her lips throughout the night, the way she sometimes confess the sheets into her hands. But she would never, after these hushed outcries, recount the dreams.

He envied it.

Kaito slowly got up and sat there quietly looking out of the window. The sun was rising, another muted gold painting everything. The world looked deceptively peaceful. Just as if it had no idea it was dying.

But it did. Everybody did.

He left the room without waking her.

Around the house it was quiet. The kitchen sat unvisited. No clinking of cups. No casual good performs. Just that same stretched silence, now settling into the walls like mold.

His father sat here, in the backyard, on the wooden chair with his elbows resting on his knees and staring at the lawn. He didn't bother looking up when Kaito came and sat with him.

"Slept bad, did you?" Kaito said.

His father took another long slow breath. "Didn't try."

Kaito nodded and went down to sit beside him. They were also very quiet for a while, listening to the birds-the few sounds left around that seemed not to have a meaning hanging around them.

It is strange, my father finally said, how quickly we stop pretending.

Kaito inclined his head.

His father waved at the house. "The routines. The small talk. The long-term plans. Gone. It took only a few months for everything that made us feel human to... vanish."

There was a rawness in his voice, something brittle.

Kaito swallowed. "Maybe we were never really as human as we thought."

For a long moment, his father looked at him before nodding.

"There's something about the end of the world," he said, "that peels everything away. Strips us down. We are forced to see ourselves-not as we imagined, but how we are."

"And what do you see?" Kaito whispered so low as to be inaudible.

His father hesitated. "Fear. Regret. Mostly regret."

Kaito looked down at his hands trembling slightly. He had not noticed this before.

"I don't want to die with nothing but regrets," he said.

His father laughed tiredly. "Nobody does. But we all will."

So they sat in that way, letting morning unfold in slow, aching quiet.

---

Later, the town felt more deserted than usual. The shops were open, but nobody seemed to be buying anything. With their eyes lowered and empty expressions, people drifted past like ghosts. The world seemed blurred, soft at the edges; like a dream that refused to sharpen.

Rika was now beside Kaito, holding on to him with one hand. She had spoken to him since she awoke, but he did not ask too much from her. He felt her heaviness and reflected it back with his own.

They passed a man seated on a bench, muttering incoherently to himself while scribbling. He did not even spare them a glance.

"What do you think he is writing?" Rika suddenly asked.

Kaito turned around. "I don't know. Perhaps a confession. Perhaps something to say before he dies."

"Or maybe gibberish," she said. "That's probably all that's left now anyway."

Kaito remained silent. Because there were times that was precisely how it felt.

They began to sit on the riverbank and watched the waters flow.

"I keep thinking," after a while, Rika began, "about how we grew up believing in things that have never existed. That time was endless. That people could be rational. That you could hold a truth."

Kaito turned to her. "And now?"

"Now I don't even know what is left to believe in."

He hesitated before answering, "About us. I still believe in us."

Her eyes softened, yet there was pain in them too. ""What does that even mean any more?"

"This means that we can talk to each other even when the world is absolutely silent," he said softly. He did not say anything more, only nodding his head.

That night, a storm rolled in.

Rain started slowly, then came down hard. Thunder sounded in the distance like a warning: something ancient and inevitable.

The family inside the house sat in the living room without talking. Rika's mother lit a candle, even though the lights still worked. The action made one feel comfortable, even if there was no bad light left to light up.

Kaito watched the candle flickering, its dancing made unsteady by the wind.

"Do you think there is anything after this?" he suddenly asked.

Everyone turned toward him.

"After the end," he clarified. "Not heaven or hell; just something."

Rika's father spoke first. "I think... we imagine an after because we cannot bear the idea of nothing."

"But maybe nothing isn't empty," Rika added, her voice soft. "Maybe it's peace. Maybe it's where all the noise finally stops."

Once again, Kaito thought of silence—how it had changed in his mind. It had ceased to be just an absence; it became a presence.

A weight. A reflection.

In it, he was viewing himself.

All of them.

Naked. Exposed. Fearful.

Yet still trying to be human a little.

As the storm raged.

As the days slipped through their fingers.

As the end drew near.