I have dreamt multiple times of water but this time something was different, bizarre, out of place. It registered in my dreams not as an undulating flow or even a sparkling stream but as a sudden burst, like doors slamming, like champagne-cork pops, a gunshot spree taking down everything important. This last simile from my unconscious rapidly traversed the labyrinths of my brain and came banging at the gates of my self-preservation. I opened my eyes and found myself in a more peculiar setting.

I later learned that it was only moments earlier that the Earth had begun to crumble into an ever-accelerating mire. Sure, it was water that would bring our end. We all knew that since time immemorial. But it wasn’t to happen in the usual magnificent ways, not through a deluge coming from above, from the outside, not beneath towering waves that inspire awe; but from below, from the soil, which started imperceptibly and unspectacularly to be swamped by ever-growing torrents of a brownish liquid. It spread mud everywhere, replacing the firm ground with a sodden mess, until all buildings, all constructions, with nowhere reliable to stand, slipped and crashed atop one another with a thunderous din.

I barely made it out, still half dressed in pyjamas, and stood dumbfounded at the threshold. The landscape was already warped into something that was hardly distinguishable as my district. I could discern the constituent parts, they were all there, even if I needed to turn my neck at an angle to identify the bulky and immediately distinctive ones. However, it was as if a gigantic toddler had gone through a temper tantrum, making a mess out of his neatly arranged life-sized playroom.

“Your laces are untied,” the little kid from next door tossed at me, snickering at my automatic twitch to look down. “Ha, you‘ll get used to it”, he continued while I was staring at my feet that had disappeared under a waterlogged muck, noticing the stench it exhaled, a composite odour that was produced by one part petrichor and two parts putrescence. I instinctively kicked the solid annoyance beneath my soles, hoping to exhume it and check its half-rotten state, but only managed to splash the boy, who misconstrued my intentions and looked at me sternly. “There isn’t time for that”, he said, and turned his back, ready to vanish. “Wait, wait”, I called, “where are you headed?”. “To the square, the geysers”, he replied. “The geysers?”, I repeated astonished. “What do you think makes all this noise?” he retorted and stared at me for a second as if silently following it with “it’s not rocket science”. It wasn’t, but still it didn’t sound so much different. “Listen”, he said, and we remained for a while hearing dry explosions, the ground going off and the tremor soon reaching us as muddy ripples.

“Wait, I am coming with you”, I said, and followed him. In this labyrinth of debris, our sense of orientation was as good as useless, and our sight was mainly used to recognise the few remaining landmarks, not as pointers but only to confirm whether we were approaching our goal or floundering in the wrong direction. To make matters worse, all lights soon went off, causing us to pause until we got used to the natural light that was coming from the unusually bright Moon. We hesitatingly moved again, but soon found a rekindled confidence, especially after we realized that we advanced much faster by hopping in a chain from one parked car to the next. I even started becoming amused with the phenomenon, adopting a grandiloquent musing while observing the abrogated roadway signs, the tilted billboards that once sat on balconies, the darkened buildings bent in mourning as if taking it all in to write a poem later. The kid pinched me out of my reverie and suggested that I stay still and silent. From a distance a vocalised noise was coming, an ominous hum, a symphony of human screams, desperate pleas, lunatic halloos, accompanied by the drum-beat of water blasting fiercely into the air.

“Welcome to the main pool”, a girl announced in a playful tone, as we were coming closer. She and the boy started an animated debate, pointing intensely first up, then down and then up again, before the girl produced from her pocket a length of rope. By then, I had already shifted my attention to the environs, where a massive throng of people were perching wherever they could, moving only to occupy a safer place on a higher heap. They all looked toward the centre of the square. They were staring at the geysers that went on sprouting—now here, now there—before they merged into bigger ones, taking the uprooted soil for a frenzied drive up to the sky. Finally, after a prolonged dread and trembling of the Earth, a huge circular hole emerged, and out of it one colossal spout, its girth like a plane tree’s trunk, erupting dead centre, shooting water to a height that vanished into the night. Everyone remained dumbstruck, with mouths agape, struggling to register this inverse planetary tap that was turned on to swipe away all the dirt from the surface.

It was then that a few drops fell on my face, then a few more, as if a drizzle was kicking in. I looked up mumbling grumpily, “That’s just what we need.” The boy smiled at me, opened his palm, collected some of the pearls and teased: “Have an umbrella?” I tried to cheer up, forcing my lips to widen, but I didn’t have time to muster a smile because a phrase was asking for my interpretation, a phrase that was circulating among the crowd and reaching me from multiple directions: “It’s a vault”. “A what?” I thought. “A fault, most probably, sure, our fault…this is what…Do they think it is time for self-criticism?”, the last sentence escaped my lips. “A vault”, said the boy, probing my mind, “vault, v, v, v for we are vucked”. At the same time, the girl pointed at the Moon, while the first shrieks were contaminating the throng, spreading rapidly an epidemic of panic. I couldn’t believe my eyes: was it possible that the Moon was moving closer, or was it not the actual thing? Whatever it was, it was apparent that the water was reaching it, touching it, hitting it hard and then bouncing back in all directions.

“So that’s no rain”, I whispered. “That’s no rain and that’s no sky”, the girl corrected me. Indeed, whatever it has replaced the sky was not even black anymore, it had taken a dark brown hue, as if consisting of mud, a colour that was interrupted only by a few bright spots that were mockingly replicating what once used to be stars. Even worse, the whole slab was coming closer, approaching at a rapid pace. I suddenly could decipher the screams, the panic, the people moving left and right, wading through the mire, stumbling and falling from rooftops to brownish puddles, hugging each other, beating their chests while praying, crying with their hands lacerating their cheeks, laughing hysterically, or standing as helpless tiny creatures caught in the headlights of the starry sky. Unease was creeping in and seeking to be transmuted into panic, while I was miserably clutching a detached philosophical verdict of the world’s end when I noticed a venture that initially seemed like a nonsensical act of desperation. A tall guy, the tallest that I have ever seen, with hands long as a spider, rapidly climbed the corpse of a luxury apartment complex, and after reaching the top he leapt, clutching a piece of rope in his hands. He grabbed one of the stars and remained hanging. For some reason, this was deemed worthy of imitation, and once the vault drew nearer many followed, lining up at spots where a faint glow showed through, holding fast, dangling in the void above a bogged-down nothing.

We are still there. After the ceiling did us the favour to stop a few meters above our heads, we strived to make our abodes a little bit more neat and permanent. It wasn’t so hard to craft sturdy hoops to hold little rooms like oversized birdcages, which became our new homes. After the panic subsided and rational discourse could make its triumphant return, several theories emerged spinning a number of explanations, from theories positing the strangulation of the space-time continuum to congregations conducting weekly rituals at the central geyser to beg for its mercy. In any case, sooner or later, we all had to accept that mud is our world now, and we are to live in cages strung from the stars. The kids are the ones taking it best, especially after they mounted a swing to the new Moon. It is a life, I guess. If only the stench would go away!