Silence

Marcus awoke slowly, feeling the warmth on his face as the sun shone in through the window. It was quiet in his room, but the warmth was something he didn't feel very often - something must have happened in the night that had prevented his alarm clock from going off. As he drifted awake, it became clear to him that he was very late for work, and that he had likely missed a number of calls because of it. How had he managed to sleep through those as well? Had his phone died in the night?

He could see it on his bedside table as he opened his eyes, and he reached groggily for it to pull it to his face. He clicked it on, and it was still powered, but there was only a single message, despite the fact that he was three hours late for work. And even then, the message had only come through within the last hour. He set it to play the message, but as he pushed the phone to his ear, he didn't hear anything. There was no static as it began to play, there was no voice. Nothing. And as he checked to see if everything was alright, he could see that the message was only a few seconds long. Surely this late into the day he should have expected at least a couple minutes of being yelled at. Something was definitely not right.

He pushed the sheets off of him and got up, making his way out to the kitchen. He wanted to check the clocks out there, see if there had been some kind of power outage in the night that might explain part of what was happening. And he noticed as he moved out that the usual ticking of said clock was missing. Surely that was some kind of sign that something had broken. But when he was able to see it, he could see that it was still functioning as normal, and that the time corresponded to what he had seen on his phone.

Everything was just too quiet. The alarm, the phone, the message, the clock. He couldn't hear the sound of cars driving by outside, or even the sound of his own footsteps as he walked around his house. He checked his ears, but as far as he could tell they weren't plugged in any way. He couldn't even hear the sound of his fingers scrapping against the canals.

The world was draped completely and perfectly in silence. There was nothing to be heard.

He prayed to god this was only a dream. Or, at the very least, that he wasn't the only one.