The ground does not shake. Gravel does not fall. There is no mighty roar, no cracking thunder, not even a whimper. It is there, a breeze blows, it is not there, it has never been. No one ever wonders why the city of Los Angeles placed such a grand sign above a sinkhole, but someone did, someone must have known. The sign is from 1923. The hole is older than time.

Man builds. The breeze blows. It is unbuilt.

The Earth is riddled with holes. They are multiplying. They have always been there. The egg's shell is beginning to fracture, and the absence of life stirs within. A silent calamity brews.

A Romanian farmer wonders why he purchased land with a giant hole in it. He peers into the edge of the abyss and sighs; then he hears it for the first time. An office worker in Lima wonders if she has been unemployed all along when she finds herself nearly stepping into the hole. In addition to her usual cocktail, her doctor prescribes her some tinnitus medication.

The breeze gains significance. Near-imperceptible, it burrows into their minds, inside their brains. In the deepest recesses of their thoughts, in the gap between their neurons, in the space between the atoms that give them substance, it whistles. It sings. But it does not blow, not yet.

A construction worker lies in bed. The whistling has been getting worse. Come morning, his wife will find a stranger in their bed, a lifeless body with a hollow skull.