Happy End (1958)

End happy one to backward runs time. Space: can emptiness be lonely if there's nothing there to feel it? Maybe that loneliness, with no antennae left to detect it and no animus left to project it, must find another outlet. The ruins left by atrocious apocalypse coalesce and coil and bristle out of the aether like spindly echoes of the life that's been scoured from this nightmare planet. These un-alive remnants provide a kind of wasteland wonderland for the protagonist, a shattered marble statue seeking something in the desert that used to be a city. Things slowly return to order and the lost boy comes home. A short story presented in beautiful and harsh colour and texture. Haunting, sorrowful, and bittersweet without a word spoken or an expression moulded in anyone's face.