In the Sky, Lord, In the Sky

The animals already knew when it happened. They all started dying.

The birds stopped singing, bugs were silenced, and a whole blanket of soundlessness dropped across the world. Almost at a moment. A collective agreement amongst the speechless to shut up their squawking and keel over.

No one paused their typing to notice the moon looked bigger or that the sun looked too small and the world was too quiet.

It wasn't important. Money, however, that was. Because money bought houses and apartments and food and surviving because living wasn't an option anymore. Surviving soon wouldn't be.

Tickets to the moon cost money but that wouldn't save anybody.

A small boy yelled first. "The sky is falling!"

His mother chided him. "Don't tell lies." She looked up to prove it and then she screamed too.

The sky is falling. 

But is it the sky? Is it the moon, finally crashing back into them as it so wanted to do? Is it the collapse of the atmosphere and the final weight of gravity being lifted off of the collective human consciousness?

Is it just falling? No one cared to guess.

Tickets to the moon wouldn't save anyone. 

Office doors poured dozens of moving bodies out of them. People flooding and hugging and crying. They grabbed pets, they grabbed family, friends, enemies they would not hate anymore. They didn't want to in the end.

It was screaming and tears and panic and apologizing and then someone started singing. 

Singing a song that had been around for too long, yet held on. Because people needed it. They needed it somehow and so it stayed.

I was standing by my window, the first voice sang. 
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw the hearse come rolling

And then there were more. Voices joining in the first verse of Can the Circle Be Unbroken, centuries old lyrics making dying voices wake up.

Will the circle be unbroken? By and by Lord, by and by

They were singing in the streets, calling to the end like a friend. It wasn't a cry for mercy. Mothers hugged their daughters, fathers cried with their sons, children and parents joined the chorus of goodbyes without ever saying it.

Neighbor with neighbor

There's a better home waiting

Friend with enemy with friend, sitting on the curb, drinking one last bottle of pop as their last sunset lamented a goodbye

In the sky Lord, in the sky.

The sky was falling. And all them humans, the last things to live while all the rest had turned tail while they could, were doing was singing. Across the world, though it was not the same song, they sang. Their voices could be heard, miniscule as the molecules in flower petals they were, they could be heard.

Lord, I hate to see her go.

And then the sky had fallen and the song had been left half sung. There was no one left to sing it. And all there was was rubble of crust and core and magma and lava. Human bodies evaporated in the heat of collision.

There's a better home awaiting
In the sky Lord, in the sky...

It was the end but they had gone out loved. Maybe remnants of that love was left afterwards too.