The Day the Choir fell Silent
No angels sang.
No trumpets blared.
Only silence.
Not the kind of silence you get at midnight on an empty street. This silence had weight. It breathed. It curled its cold, skeletal fingers around the dying man’s throat and squeezed. He felt it coil, felt its icy grip settle deep in his chest, tighter with every second. He tried to inhale, but the silence stole even that.
He blinked, looking for light, for some hint of heaven’s choir, for a glimmer of what he used to laugh off as “fairy tales for the weak.” But there was nothing—no melody, no mercy.
Just a black, suffocating nothingness.
And then the sound started.
Not heavenly voices.
Not harps.
Screams.
They came in waves, distorted and raw, as if a thousand throats had been torn open by fire and fury. The screams sounded both close and impossibly far away, like echoes of a nightmare he couldn’t wake from.
His heart stumbled in his chest, tripping over its own beats. He wasn’t just dying—he was alone. Not the alone of an empty house or a forgotten phone call. This was loneliness that bled, that gnashed its teeth, that pressed its forehead to his soul and whispered, “You did this. You built this silence.”
A single memory surfaced—his mother’s voice, trembling but firm, singing old hymns on Sunday mornings. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…” But now the sound was gone. Worship doesn’t echo in hell. And heaven’s choir has no verse for those who never tuned their hearts.
The old man saw it clearly now: the void in his chest wasn’t an accident. God had carved eternity into him like a hollow chamber meant to be filled with His presence. But the man had stuffed it with cheap thrills and counterfeit joys, pouring in everything but God. Fame, drink, lust, ambition—like gasoline poured into a lamp that was never lit.
And now? Now that lamp was shattered.
The silence grew heavier, slithering into his ears, choking him, wrapping its tentacles around his mind. He wanted to scream, but even his voice seemed stolen. In the distance, the fiery echoes of the damned kept wailing. Their pain was real, but even that sound only made his own loneliness worse.
He wasn’t just cut off from people. He was cut off from the One. The Creator who had whispered his name before the foundations of the world. The God who once stood at the door of his heart and knocked.
But the man never answered. He was too busy.
Too important.
Too stubborn.
Now there was no door. No knocking.
Only silence.
The air grew hotter. At first, he thought it was the fever, but no—this heat wasn’t coming from outside. It was rising from deep within him, like his own soul had ignited. His veins burned, his skin prickled, and sweat slid down his forehead in thin, accusing rivers.
“Time to burn in loneliness,” hissed a voice.
It came from nowhere.
It came from everywhere.
He clenched the pew in front of him, splinters biting his palm. His knuckles went white. But the sanctuary was empty—no preacher, no choir, no congregation.
The choir had fallen silent.
And so had heaven.
The man opened his mouth—not to pray, not to plead—but to release a sound that was barely human.
A ragged, broken sob—the last thing he gave this world—before the fire took everything else.
“There’s still time to change the road you’re on,” he croaked, half-singing a line from a song that once meant nothing… until it meant everything.
But the flames didn’t wait.
They wrapped around him like a verdict.
And in that final, gasping breath—
he learned the cruelest truth of all:
The only time to change… is now.
Tomorrow doesn’t burn.
Only souls do.