The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons by Paula Guran Page B

melting.
    He’d presumably been walking, but he’s not walking anymore. He’s rooted to the sidewalk, his legs already a fused and formless mass, his flesh and his clothes running in multicolored ripples of dissolution down what used to be his body as if he was some life-size religious candle burning in fast-forward.
    Other people on Brand Boulevard are screaming now, some running away, some gathering to see, one idiot on his cellphone like he could actually fetch help, another using hers to snap a little souvenir of the atrocity. A group forms around the vanishing man, circling him but not going near, as if instinctively establishing a perimeter from which to bear witness but to keep themselves safe.
    From what’s left of the man’s face – now liquidly elongated into a vile burlesque that puts Bethany briefly and horribly in mind of Munch’s screamer – he appears to be, have been, a middle-aged white guy. He has a life, Bethany thinks, he has a story, has people who love him. But he’s featureless in little more than a second. One of his arms has already disappeared into the oozing chaos of the meltdown but the other is waving grotesquely free, fingers twitching either in agony or, as Bethany wonders with a devastating stab of pity, as if he just wants someone to hold his hand in farewell as he slides helplessly from life.
    When there’s finally nothing about it to suggest it had ever been human, the roiling mass begins to shrink in on itself, disappearing into a vanishing center as if hungry for its own destruction, growing smaller and smaller until, at last, it shivers itself into nothingness. There’s not even a stain on the sidewalk. It’s taken maybe seven seconds.
    “Oh my God,” says Bethany.
    Arcadia is keeping his eyes on the window. “Watch what happens next,” he says. And when Bethany does, she decides that it’s even more appalling than what came before.
    Everybody walks away.
    There’s a blink or two from one or more of them, and one older woman in a blue pantsuit looks to her left as if she thought her peripheral vision may have just registered something, but there’s no screaming, no outrage, no appeals to heaven or cries of What-just-happened? Everybody on the street quietly moves on about their day, neither their manner nor their expressions suggesting that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
    “What’s wrong with them?” says Bethany. “They’re all acting like it never happened.”
    “Don’t be cross with them,” Arcadia tells her. “It sort of didn’t happen.”
    “But it did.”
    “I don’t want to get too abstract about it,” he says, “but it’s a sort of tree falling in the forest question, isn’t it? Can something actually be said to have happened if it’s something nobody in the world remembers?”
    “ I remember,” Bethany says.
    Arcadia holds her gaze for a second or two, his face expressionless. “Aha,” he says quietly.
    Bethany’s still trying to think about that when he pulls his watch from his vest pocket and checks it. “Hmm,” he says. “Only eleven minutes in and already a serious anomaly. That’s a bit worrying.”
    “What?” says Bethany, horrified as much at his calmness as at the idea that this nightmare is on some kind of a schedule.
    “Clock’s a-ticking,” he says. “Lunch will have to wait. Come on.”
    Bethany’s surprised to see that she’s following him as he moves to the door and opens it. Perhaps it’s the tinkling of the bell, perhaps just a desire to remember what she was doing the last time the world made sense, but something makes her look back at the counter.
    “Wait,” she says. “What about your book?”
    Arcadia throws it an unconcerned glance. “Do you know what a McGuffin is, Bethany?” he says.
    “Yes,” she says, because she does. She watches her fair share of Turner Classic Movies and she briefly dated a guy who once had an actual name but whom she’s long decided will be known to her memoirs