They said it was just the weight of rain.

  The old triumphal arch near the eastern gate finally succumbed during a storm. One of the keystones gave out, and half the structure collapsed into the road below.

  No one was crushed. A blessing, they said.

  The rubble was cleared just enough for carts to pass and then left to rest like a half-buried giant. No masons came. No rope cordons were laid. People just learned to walk around it.

  Marius passed it on his way to the granary each week. Where once there had been guards and scribes and orderly lines, now there was only a rusted gate and a clerk with sunken eyes.

  The grain ration was late again.

  “A shipment was stolen,” someone muttered. “Or maybe lost in the marshes.”

  His son, now almost grown, asked him a question at dinner that evening. “Do you think there will be enough next winter?”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “There always is,” Marius replied automatically. Then he thought of the bakeries that no longer opened, of the neighbors who had left for the countryside and never returned, of the last physician in the quarter who had packed his tools and gone north. Of the honeyed bread he’d eaten as a boy that had only once or twice passed his son’s lips.

  It was hard to have faith the world could ever go back to how it was. The flame was in a continual flicker, not returning to its previous, supposedly natural state.

  Julia had died the previous year—from a fever no one could name. The priest came and prayed, but there had been no herbs left in the garden, and no apothecary to fetch more. The church bells had sounded different since then. Thinner, more distant.

  He found himself walking more. Watching the buildings weather and lean. The villas nearby were falling quiet. One was overgrown with ivy, another had a caved-in roof. When he was young, they’d been filled with music and arguments and laughter during Saturnalia.

  Now, there was only wind and the distant bark of dogs.

  A merchant in the forum spoke of new trade routes to the east. Of coin minted in Ravenna with strange designs. Of a world moving on.

  Marius nodded. But when he passed the broken arch again that night, he stopped and stared for a long time, feeling as though something had died and been left unburied.