Looks vaguely like rain

It wasn’t rain of course, and we all knew that, but, in that sort of watercolor painting sort of way, it did look vaguely like rain. At first anyhow.

The phenomenon, later called The Blurring, was first noticed by truckers and ranchers off on the horizon of those big, square states in the middle: Nebraska, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and later in Idaho, parts of Colorado, Texas and so on. Off on the horizon it looked like the gray, streaky haze of rain reaching down from the sky. For the first few weeks no one gave it much thought until it was noticed that, in places not necessarily known for a lot of rain, there always seemed to be a storm off in the distance. And always, it would seem, in the distance.

Ultimately it was discover – not explained, as there really is no explanation - that the phenomenon was not rain but a sort of unraveling of areas of the world that were uninhabited. Scientists have neither explanation nor even theories; as far as anyone can tell it is simply a result of subjective reality. That is to say: in that there’s no one there to contemplate these places, to hold them in active memory as it were, they simply have started to fade. Again, there’s no logic, no scientific reason or even leading theories as to how this could happen or, since the world has of course been vacant of human minds for nearly its entire history, why it would start happening now.

And still, from a distance, it looks vaguely like rain.