The Box Has Twelve Sides: Thirteen Curious Tales to Delight and Disturb

INTO THE PURPLE SKY

THEY ANNOUNCED THE END on radio and TV first, amazingly enough. Then it hit the internet; kind've ass-backward in Pamela's opinion.

Social media began playing it up as a type of contest, seeing who would react how and why. There were polls on Facebook before the virtual ink was even dry: 'What Kind of End of the Worlder Are YOU?' and 'Celebrity Apocalypse Look-Alike Contest' and 'What Will Your Last Meal Be?'

Soon, people finally figured out it was real.

Pamela was at work that morning, a Friday. Ironic, in a way, as Fridays do tend to be when most employees are given their walking papers.

The TV in the break room was tuned to MSNBC. As with most of the main news programs, they like to overplay the Breaking News angle.

Breaking News: A-List Movie Star Returns To Rehab For Third Time.

Breaking News: Congress Can't Agree On Immigration Bill.

Breaking News: Water Is Wet.

Everything was Breaking News.

Not anymore.

Pamela's boss came around about ten o'clock and told the secretarial staff they could go home for the rest of the day, it being the end of the world and all. However, the supervisor smiled and gave them the caveat that they had to be on time Monday morning. Armageddon or not, it wasn't an excuse to just lay out at the start of a work-week. It was probably one of the world's more popular office jokes that day.

Most of the staff vacated fairly quickly. Pamela glanced at the tchotchkes she had managed to place around her cubicle for comfort: little Belle and Beast figurines (Beauty and the Beast was her favorite, especially after the recent Disney remake of the musical), a fifty year-old photo of her mom and dad on their honeymoon in Gatlinburg, a 1:24 die-cast replica of Junior's number 88 NASCAR ride... These were just a few of her baubles, little pieces of a mundane personality. I am as eclectic as I am boring, she thought.

She briefly considered packing everything into a box and taking it with her for safe keeping, but then realized it would be pointless. Removing her dad and mom's picture from its frame, she placed it into the side pocket of her windbreaker, the lone exception.

Pamela walked out of the Blake Insurance Underwriters office just before eleven o'clock on the next-to-the-last-day of the world, wondering what to do next.

Until now, black holes had been strictly theoretical. Never had one been visibly captured by Hubbell as a pinprick against the star field of the Milky Way. There had never been any hard evidence, no shift of light from stars or no warped photon path. It was all calculus and concept, speculation and supposition. As long as black holes continued to be conjecture, they remained safe and harmless. And not worthy of attention.

Yesterday, theory became fact.

An anomaly had been detected approximately 150,000 miles from the surface of the Earth. One day it wasn't there; the next day it was.

Scientists tend to overuse the word 'anomaly' to describe something they don't know anything about. Anything which had an incongruity or inconsistency, well that was an anomaly. It makes sense, in a way: if scientists had the proper vocabulary for half their discoveries, there would be no innovations. It was all about usefulness and value.

For the first time in human history, a black hole was now visible. It floated between the Earth and the moon, looking suspiciously like an old fashioned baby's rattle; one made from leftovers found lying around a rustic country cabin, warped and asymmetrically shaped, a bulbous mass on one side connected by a rod to a smaller ring on the other.