Hush

         It was the fourth night of March, and the Lev was running late. This happened so rarely that the event itself was received as a slight miracle. It was less of an annoyance to the passengers than it was a moment to consider the pervasiveness of human error, that it would persist even in the tightly coiled machinery of Levcorp. It was certainly the right setting for such reflection. Behind and ahead the Twin Cities sparkled yellow, but all that lay between was shadow. Long grasses rippled in the dark like fronds of coral as the Lev slipped quietly through the cool night air, leaving a hushed sound like a long exhale in its wake.
         The man at the window of the last car could hear it distinctly. His broad face pressed against the window, forehead resting on the humming glass. He paid no attention to the few people with whom he shared the brightly lit compartment. If you had been standing in a field as the train passed, you would have seen his eyes flick just slightly, as if he was searching for something. He was. This was the place where he had grown up, and it seemed that somewhere in the night the old farmhouse where he had been born was still standing.
         It was not, of course. His parents had sold their land for no small amount when the vertical farming companies moved in. They leveled the hills where the house once stood and ran drainage tunnels through the cornfield. The fences around the edges of the land, which stood for generations and were only replaced when they broke, had been torn down to make way for irrigation canals. The land was carved and cemented until it was sterile, yet somehow the cold, monolithic buildings that speckled the farm country produced enough food to keep millions of bellies full in the cities whose streets were filled with the solid mass of packed crowds.
         The man at the window was part of this crowd. Each day he walked among them, keeping his step in line with the person in front of him, indistinguishable to anyone but a close friend. He did not have many of these, save for Leona, who was at his side even now.
         Her light hair was braided and thin under the fluorescent lamps, and her mouth was set in a streak of scarlet across her face. Leona was often silent, and this silence was what drew him to her so many years before. She had been sitting next to him in the lecture hall, staring intently ahead as if someone was painting her. The sun slanted in across her narrow shoulders and pooled onto the papers in front of her, and she was quiet in the middle of a loud room. He had imagined drinking her silence, draining it away like a falling ocean and walking among the ghostly fossils that would be what was left of her thoughts. He knew fossils.
         It was a day in the fall after the harvest was done, and the boy walked with his father along a gravel road. The road cut through hills, cleaving through the soft grass to expose the swirl of sediment that lay beneath. To a boy so small, the side of the road seemed edged with great gray cliffs composed of the same fine gravel that lay under his feet. His father pointed to a spot near the bottom of the cliff. The spot was made of dark clay, and they walked to it. His father tore away a handful of clay, spinning it between his wide palms. He stopped and shook the clay, and out dropped a few tiny, spiraling shells covered in dust.
         His father placed a shell in the boy's hand and told him a story. He spoke about the Great Flood, about a time when God covered the land with the sea. He said that the hills were an ocean floor, and it seemed like a fairytale, but the boy saw the shells in his hand and knew it was true. The man remembered this.
         Later, the moments became less clear. Sometimes, right before he fell asleep, the man could see flashes of memory like projection slides, flicking by each time he blinked. The farm in summer. The farm in fall. His mother praying, many times, many places. His childhood bedroom, empty and filled with dust. The new moon on the night he realized he no longer believed in God. Leona. Leona sleeping, her body bare, the white sheet clinging to her like marble to an unfinished statue. He remembered this.
         The man was an orphan now. He would not have known this if not for a polite letter from a polite neighbor who had been given the responsibility of making arrangements for the bodies. His parents had died within the same month, by the hand of what the doctors called "natural causes." The arrangements were simple and strange. There would be no burial, no service, no cremation. The bodies that had once been the man's parents were taken to a squat medical building. Their blood was swapped for a cold, cloudy liquid, and they were frozen, packed away for some future when they would be resurrected.
         As seemed to happen so often in those years, the future was now. It was only a matter of new chemicals and new organs, lab-grown blood and tissue to replace what had been lost. The dead were waking up every day now, time travelers arriving in a world which was strange to them. The doctors worked first on the rich, and then on the famous. Ordinary people were woken by their family, and the man was the last of the family.
         He exhaled just slightly, just quietly, settling back into his seat with half-closed eyes. Today was the last day to send in the paperwork. In a few hours, none of this would mean anything, and he was so close to the deadline, so close to release. Leona did not know this, and she would not know. The city was drawing closer, spilling light into the cloud-streaked sky, and he glanced one last time at the landscape outside. It was empty. If anything of meaning lay there, it had already passed.