IMMINENCE

a suburb, on the last evening

Play: https://the-imminence.netlify.app

Everyone in Fairhill grew up knowing it would come — the way you know about winter. Nobody moved away over it. This week, the whole town knew which evening. Over one real-time evening (~10 minutes, and it cannot be paused), a vast presence arrives over the town (pop. 1,214) while the sun goes down on the other side of the sky — one light replacing another. Nothing is asked of anyone. But it is the custom, on the last evening, to see the small things once more, before they are gathered.

The whole world is silkscreened: three inks on cream stock, and a fourth — a gold the world's inks don't have — that belongs only to what is arriving. Light is the paper showing through. Over the evening the gold stops being ink and becomes leaf, and then it begins to infiltrate the town's own print, field by field, from the ground up.

The point of view

The end is not news here, and nobody sent a notice. Fairhill has always known the world would end within living memory, the way any town knows winter is coming; only the date was open, and it arrived like weather-sense. That is why nobody argues, why Mr. Delgado finishes the lawn, why the streetlight schedule is kept to the end, and why seeing the small things is a custom rather than an instruction. The evening is a lifetime at 60×: you spend it paying attention, and at the end the attention is returned. You saw. And were seen.

How it plays

• WASD walk · mouse look · hold E to see · Q to sit down · M sound
• On touch: the left half of the screen is a floating stick (it appears under your thumb), the right half looks, and you hold SEE.
• You begin facing the sun going down. The other light is behind you.
• Seeing is a dialogue: witnessed people look back; sprinklers bend their water upward; the car radio harmonizes with your bell note; the presence pulses in answer as your count grows — and the town's hum opens its mouth a little each time.
• Every thing has an early line and a late line — the same mailbox has stranger facts to report once the other light is up.
• The hum is a chord being assembled all evening: bare octaves, then the fifth at dusk, then the F that streetlight no. 212 has held for thirty years, a major third once every head has turned, a ninth near the end — and the whole chord