by sumedha

“The sky looks delicious when it burns,” I said once, and I still mean it. The crackle of their own cleverness is frying them alive. What a feast for the eyes. Fire in the skies, water climbing where it shouldn’t, screens still blinking though no one’s left to squint at them. It is obscene, and it is beautiful.

“You always say that,” says the other voice. I almost forgot she was here. Almost. She surfaces like an echo from another cavern. “You said the same thing when the mammoths went under.”

“And I was right,” I murmur. “Wooly giants felled by spears and hunger. This… Um,” I wave at the ash hanging in the sky, “this is more… Deliberate.”

We’ve wandered the world too long, she and I. We used to write letters, back when parchment and couriers made such things charming. I once wrote from Rome as it burned: The city is a bonfire, and the fiddler is smiling too wide. She replied centuries later from Constantinople: The walls will hold, but not forever. They never do.

The first crawlers from the sea, I remember watching them with her. They dragged themselves out, blinking, coughing up salt. Later we argued over the dinosaurs.

“You adored them,” she teases.

“I respected them,” I correct. “Though you must admit, no empire of man has ever matched the thunder of their footsteps.”

“Nor their feathers.” She laughs softly. “Your precious humans drew them naked as lizards. They never imagined them as jeweled kings.”

We keep a running tally of civilizations like gamblers noting debts.

“The Cholas?” I ask.

“Magnificent bronzes,” she sighs. “But they thought permanence could be cast.”

“The Mings?”

“Silk walls, crumbling like paper in the rain.”

“Rome?”

She smirks. “Which one?”

Even their Holy Roman Empire (neither holy, nor Roman, nor much of an imperial empire either) amused us. She sent me a letter then, centuries gone: They are drunk on titles. Let them sleep it off.

And now, here at the end, she leans closer. “You mourn them.”

“I do not.”

“You do. A little. You carry their laughter like seashells in your pockets. You hum their hymns when you think I don’t hear.”

I stay silent. The wind does the talking for me.

Humans thought themselves eternal. They bottled stars, dug holes through their own planet’s ribs, stitched their world with wires so taut it snapped in an instant. The collapse came slowly, then suddenly, like a bridge groaning for centuries before tumbling in one sharp gasp. Famines stoked, wars courted, air turned poisonous by their own engines. A clever current, undone by its own cleverness.

“They always write their obituaries in advance,” she whispers. “Every myth, every prophecy. They knew this ending was possible.”

“And yet they rushed toward it,” I reply.

The silence after is heavy, almost tender. She looks at me, as if remembering some half-finished letter.

“Shall we go on, then?” she asks.

“Where else is there to go?”

The water flows on. Always has. Always will. Whether it carves new canyons or carries their bones out to sea, we remain, humming to ourselves.

Eternity is terribly dull without company.

sumedha (she/her) is a queer, brown storyteller and researcher. Her work wanders through cultural memory, mythology, and history, while asking how identity is shaped, fractured, and remembered across time. Her work explores the porous borders between self and the collective as well.