The Last Days of Gravity

Published: March 23, 2025 — written 2 weeks and 3 days ago.

“Don’t you think it’s strange that everyone is feeling so good lately?”

Sheryl spun her pen around her thumb and caught it. Impatiently clicking its end, she peered across her monitor looking at her colleague, Meredith, who was trying to focus on the columns of her spreadsheet.

“So what? Can’t we have something nice in a while?”

“Yeah, but it’s just so, … strange? Like when you take off your backpack after a long walk, but feeling like that all the time? Something is different!”

Meredith shrugged, “Maybe they put something in the water? It would explain why I’m finally losing weight! For god’s sake, I’ve been working on that deficit for ages!” The older woman cackled, shaking her grey locks hugging her face.

“I’m being serious!” Sheryl sounded more annoyed than concerned. “Forget it, I’m getting lunch. Jaden?!”

The slim figure of a young man appeared standing up behind Meredith, sporting a pair of thick, black frames looking way too big for his nose. Still, it suited him and matched his short, curly hair.

“Yeah, to the new place down the road? I’m starving.”

He was the first to leave the small office and aim down the corridor, with Sheryl trailing behind. Passing the water dispenser, it gave off yet another of its random gurgling sounds, followed by a handful of bubbles rising up towards the upside-down bottom of the water canister. Jaden froze.

“Well, that’s strange, …” He pointed at the blue plastic barrel, with the bubbles still climbing up, and seemingly as if not in a hurry.

Sheryl stood next to him, watching the transparent shapes rise. At the same time, the plants lining the walls of the hallway began stretching their grassy leaves towards the ceiling, as if all of them waving upwards in unison. Sheryl’s stomach lurched. Briefly, she felt her own feet rise and then press back down into her sandals. Then, the plants returned to their usual hanging shapes, and the bubbles burst through the water’s surface. Goosebumps crawled over her arms.

“What the fuck was that?” she whispered.

Jaden was quiet, too. “You know the feeling when you go over a long bump on the highway? When it lifts you out of the seat for a bit?”

Sheryl nodded, her face pale. “Yeah, like that.”

Day 17

“At least the new sandwich place is great!” Jaden mumbled with his mouth still full, chasing to finish his lunch.

Sheryl had lost her appetite, constantly keeping an eye on her surroundings, looking for signs of whatever was going on. She tried to listen to the conversations of the groups of colleagues gathered in groups at the other tables surrounding them. But as Meredith joined them, immediately crunching her fork into her salad bowl, her concentration was broken. Scrunching her eyebrows, she watched her older colleague drown her salad under a thick sauce.

“Well, all I’m saying is, everyone’s just lost a little bit of weight. It’s not a surprise in these stressful times. People eat less.”

Meredith sounded content. She nodded first at Sheryl and then at the untouched sandwich in front of her, still wrapped in its paper.

“You could give yours to Jaden, he could use it.” she said, then spun her fork in a circle, dug out the impaled bits of salad, and pointed it at her colleague sitting opposite her. She waited for the excess salad sauce to drop back down into the bowl, only to watch it drooping, without breaking.

“Hm…” she sounded pensive. “Maybe, …”, but before she could finish her sentence, the sauce began reversing its direction. Everything around them lost its weight. The table between them began sliding away. Sheryl shrieked, trying to hold onto her chair, inadvertently kicking out and into Jaden’s knee. He jerked up and coughed, sending a mouthful of his sandwich flying into the air, where it stayed for an eternal second before it fell down, splashing onto the table.

The usual rumble of the cafeteria turned into a bustling chaos. Shrieks of panic, people crying into their smartphones trying to reach loved ones, and footsteps of those already running away filled the space around them.

Day 47

“See, it’s not that bad!” Meredith smiled at herself as she walked up the stairs without effort. “Eighty percent gravity really suits me. And everyone looks so much younger!”

Sheryl shook her head.

“I still don’t think it’s good,” she protested. “And why do we pretend things are still normal? Why do we still have to work if this is…”

Instinctively, she held on to the railing as she felt her weight drop. By now, she had gotten used to the gravitational fluctuations. And luckily, since the last three weeks, they did not make her feel sick anymore. She continued her train of thought as soon as she felt her weight return to her new normal, “… is this going to be the end?”

“It’s not going to be the end! I read on the—-”

Sheryl interrupted her colleague as she overtook her.

“I don’t care what you read online. No one knows why this is happening. All I know, all everyone knows, is it keeps happening.”

During the past weeks, a constant feeling of dread had replaced the missing gravity and kept pulling at her from the inside. Sheryl didn’t care about being able to jump further, having less joint pain, or not getting out of breath when walking up the stairs. All she cared about was knowing how long it was going to take until it got worse. She listened to the voice continuing from behind her.

“See, even the government said—-“

Day 89

The office was quiet, with the small kentia palm pointing its leaves like spikes towards the ceiling. From across the desk, Sheryl listened to the hum of Meredith’s oxygen compressor. The last decrease in gravity had only been days ago, pushing everyone’s limits. As much as feeling lighter and stronger had felt like a bonus up to now, not everyone was acclimatised sufficiently to cope with the thinning atmosphere.

Jaden bounced into the room without saying a word, but the quick glance he exchanged with Sheryl was all she needed to see. He was ready.

Day 127

“Faster!” Jaden was screaming in the passenger seat.

“I can’t. I’m flooring it! It’s just not doing anything.”

Sheryl controlled her breathing, taking deep and slow breaths as her heart was racing. She knew they didn’t have long. He kept checking his watch.

Everyone was fleeing the city, but they were heading towards it. A steady stream of honks and shouts emanated from the other lanes.

“It’s here!”

Jaden’s desperate shouts to navigate her had been testing her patience. His promise of taking her with him was the only thing that kept her from slapping him around the car. But even if she wasn’t certain the plan would work, at least it kept her busy. It kept her sane: something to do. A purpose.

She watched the gigantic clouds towering above, dwarfing the world underneath them. In the places where rain fell out, it drifted with the winds into long thin curtains across the city. The hangar of the aeronautics museum stood tall as she left her car behind, its sides scratched and the roof dented. She had misjudged the brakes and traction to the road as she had left the highway, running off it and sent them rolling into a field.

“Let’s go inside,” he whispered, rubbing his leg. She followed him limping ahead. He banged at the door, and an old woman opened, looking eerily familiar to him. She peered at them and beckoned them inside. For a moment, Sheryl thought they would close the door in front of her, abandoning her outside. But the lady held out her hand, and she weakly pressed it.

“I’m Sheryl,” she spoke as she stepped into the building. The door creaked and rattled as the woman locked it behind her.

Day 131

The small space capsule, with its burnt heat shield, had been lowered down from the ceiling the day before. Now, it was resting on the naked concrete at the end of the hangar. From outside, you heard the wind rattling past the structure.

Sheryl slowly skipped across the grey surface, jumping from one leg to the other towards the others who were waiting for her. Three small figures stood next to a triangular hunk of metal, with its blackened round base. As she approached them, she could barely hear them debating whether to open the hangar or not. But before she could add her thoughts, gravity failed her right as she jumped off the floor again. Her trajectory lifted her off the floor, letting her rise higher and higher. The building creaked and groaned, and cracks shot into the once smooth concrete.

“NO!” she screamed, as she launched towards the ceiling. Aimlessly tumbling, she flew above their heads and past the capsule, towards the metal walls of the hangar doors.

The dull thud of her impact was swallowed by the storm on the other side.

“Oh fuck.” she grunted, as she began accelerating towards the floor again, but her second impact, landing on her feet, was soft. She waited for gravity to return to its latest normal of thirty percent, then joined the others.

“I’m ready.” she said, nodding at the open hatch.

One after the other, they climbed inside, each of them finding their seats. The small space was packed with cans, water canisters, bags, and rucksacks bundled and tied down to the walls around them, leaving hardly any space to move. The only space that was not covered was a small window above the two middle seats. Jaden closed the hatch.

“It’s sealed. How much time do we have left?”

Sheryl checked her phone and slid it back into a pocket sewn onto her jeans above her knee.

“Twenty minutes.”

The small cabin fell silent. The only sounds were the rustling of legs against the plastic moulds of the seats and the friction of straps being pulled tight around them.

Everyone quietly waited until the old man broke the silence.

“So this is it?”

But no one answered. Sheryl sighed and looked up through the window at the grey patterns of the hangar’s ceiling, and with the blink of an eye, it was torn away, filling the cabin with light. The quiet whirring of fans behind her back was covered with the storm pelting the space capsule.

A loud bang shook the passengers inside, turning the window dark for a brief moment.

“That was the wall,” Jaden whispered. He fumbled his fingers across an array of buttons. “The pressure is holding; pop your ears.”

Sheryl moved her jaw and swallowed, and indeed, breathing felt easier again, calming her.

And when the timer on her phone rang, the storm around them vanished. The concrete floor of what was once the hangar came into view and slowly spun away. The horizon diagonally crossed the small window.

“The storm is taking us with it.”

Day 137

For two days, the grey, brown mass of Earth quietly hung above their heads, and now, as they moved deeper into the shadow of what was once their planet, they were surrounded by the evaporating oceans expanding and stretching into space around them, creating a new, glowing horizon.

“It’s beautiful,” Sheryl whispered as she saw the first embers of the molten core shining through the dissolving crust.

“But what the fuck is that?” she shrieked, pointing at the window above her. “Those… tiny spheres? Are they eating the planet?”