The architect wept.
          What else could one do, when one emerged from a cocoon of twisted sheets to find a cold space in the bed, to open the doors of children’s rooms and find no children?  All the phones were dead.
          The architect did not know where the family had gone, did not know that it was gone, but felt it, a heavy gray knot twisting in her gut. She returned to the master bedroom and made the bed with much sentiment and trembling, the only fitting funeral for a marriage she could think of. The covers smoothed over the impressions two bodies had worn into the mattress.
          After uncountable minutes, she stepped out into the hall again, closed doors without looking in, drifted down the stairs. On the sixth step, she keeled over, clutching the banister, and retched. Bile and panic rose in her throat. However, it subsided in a moment, and she kept walking, sightless in the dark until the window in the living room emerged. A green haze seeped in through the broken glass and pooled on the floor as the architect walked across it, numb to the shards that stuck in the soles of her feet. The air smelled of ozone and iron.
          Every house on the street was not collapsed, not collapsing, but frozen in a moment of collapse. Improbably precarious splinters of wood, delicate as cobwebs, jutted from walls. Roofs and entire panels of wood were gone, showing rooms empty and undisturbed, like rooms of a doll house. All cast shadows that should not have been as crisp as midday. The architect looked for a full moon, but the sky was empty, the same formless green-gray shroud without horizon. Every surface was wrong, like the world before a storm, electrified and cold. Draped and skewered haphazardly across every structure were vast tapestries, sheets, palls, white and burgundy and blue, each twist and fold stark in the lurid light.
          Through the miasma, a listless whisper reached the architect’s ear, settled in the basement of her brain and gently awoke dusty memories that she had forgotten about forgetting. They played like an old film, a flickering, grainy projection on the back of her eyes. The architect knew the sound marrow-deep, the way a child knows its mother, and yet could not place its origin.
          When the she walked out the door and turned back, she saw her own house was in a similar state of disintegration. The balcony tumbled over itself into the garden, or what she was sure had been the garden: there were no flowers there, or anywhere.
          The architect wondered frantically if the bomb could stop time- there were plenty of things they didn’t know about the bomb, that’s why they had to blow up islands and things- and wondered if it was a dream, or if she was cracking up, and where were her children and her wife- no, husband- no, Agatha, Agatha Williams, she was, in her head she was, the wife of an architect named-
          The whisper of the distance did not say his name or hers. A violent pain seized the architect. He vomited on the porch, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and walked away.

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          There were no signs in the town, but that did not matter, for the architect knew every street. He wandered barefoot through the smoke, through half-light and half-ruins of buildings. He could not see where the shadows came from. He could not remember the name of the town. The breath in the distance rumbled on.
The architect passed several diners which he had frequented, now strewn with blankets of green and violet. He had worked at several in his youth, washing dishes and serving breakfast to the tired men and women he would eventually grow into. He remembered being them, too, sipping days of cups of coffee and tea.
The memories flickered past, half-seen in no discernible order, superimposed on one another and spliced together like scenes from different films. The architect had not known she had so many eyes. It must have been the radiation, she thought.

          In the center of town leaned the bank on toothpick scaffolding, and he remembered sitting in the office on the highest floor, which was not so terribly high after all, staring at the vines on the white plaster ceiling with a peculiar emptiness; he saw himself mopping the black marble floor of the lobby until it showed the reflections of faces and chandeliers. Scarlet shrouds hung from its windows.
          Passing the courthouse, the pseudo-Roman pillars of which stood skewed at odd angles and draped with gray veils, she remembered the falling sensation of a dreaded verdict, simultaneously watching himself from the judge’s chair with a heavy heart even as she sealed his fate, while another heart wondered from the second row of the jury box if she had made the right call, if anyone could have. He remembered the drafty cells in the basement, and shivered.
          She remembered every place of worship she had ever entered.

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          The architect walked the streets of the city for three hours, or days, or forty. Her palms were torn from falling whenever a wave of nausea washed over her. When she could not stand, she crawled.
           At last she arrived at the railway station on edge of town, the last outpost of civilization. There was nothing beyond but desert for miles and miles. Swaths of maroon velvet hung over the clock outside.
          The whisper was now a dull roar, and for a moment she thought it might be a train arriving from some distant city. She placed her ear to the rails, but they were still.
          “Is there anybody out there?” she cried, stupid and hoarse. She fell into a fit of coughing, and tasted blood. When she could breathe again, albeit with difficulty, she hauled herself to her feet and peered out into the distance. The tracks stretched out before her and met no horizon, just melted into the fog. The architect wished, absurdly, for a lighthouse, and remembered, suddenly, the sound of the sea.

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