It was snowing. The sun was high, clouds floated in the air like balls of white cotton candy, fallen acorns laid scatted among soft blades of unmowed grass, and a motherly oak tree towered over the field. It was snowing—yes, but it wasn’t snow. Scraps of blue fabric fluttered out of the sky like leaves. Raining from the clouds and the sun. Drifting, down down down down—they settled on the warm grass. People stepped outside in every country, in every city, in every Podunk town, and they watched the blue snow fall like ash. It came in a dense cloud of whispers and light brushing touches. The people looked up with fearful eyes at the shredded sky. They screamed and shouted: The sky is falling! The sky is falling! But it was too late. The king walked to his palace window and gazed out over his land just as the last few bits of atmospheric dandruff came to rest on the grass. The people walked over the ground, thick with pale blue sky, and looked up—or was it down?—at what remained: a series of metal supports, glittering with rust, floating in an endless sea of nothing, and the sun hanging from a fraying rope, swinging, swinging in the wind.