Sensum:
The sky endlessly churns—a distant rumble. No sunlight. A tree-lined suburban street finely coated in a layer of undisturbed white dust. Poison clouds, clouds of spores. No wind.
Datum:
On a wooden shelf in a damp root cellar, a mason jar that contains a dead cockroach, post-ecdysis.
Transposition:
A series of cavernous, empty spaces at the end of a winding road. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Walls covered with portraiture: families, children, hands and feet. Wood paneling. Molded ceilings. Various arrangements of tarnished silver. Significant water damage. Black mold. A staircase that leads nowhere.
Electromagnetic Radiation:
None.
Semiotics:
Street signs stripped of paint—no names, no directions. Stones stacked in a rough circle atop the hollow stump of a dead tree. A fragment of a fingernail embedded in a cinderblock wall. The jawbone of a small animal. Mothballs. Motionless rivers of glue. No rain. An endless forest of barren trees, carpeted with the shed exoskeletons of countless cockroaches.
Narrative:
All that remains.
—
David Peak’s writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, 3:AM Magazine, [PANK], Electric Literature, Flaunt, and elsewhere. His book on horror, speculation, and extinction, The Spectacle of the Void, was published by Schism Press in 2014.