It was on April the 7th of last year, a day of gentle showers over the Caribbean, that the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis fell ill and died. Had it happened to Ethiopia or Armenia, venerable old countries whose forests were afflicted with tremors and whose fields were blotched with age, we would not have been so surprised. Or to Sudan or Uzbekistan, Croatia or East Timor, which, though young, had been sickly and frail from the moment of their inception. Or even to China, so large and powerful yet so very ancient that we could imagine its heart striped with bands of yellow fat, seizing as the sun filled its coastal plains. But it was not China or Ethiopia that expired so unexpectedly on April the 7th. It was the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, a mere adolescent among nations, its two islands protruding from the blue waters of the sea like the knees of a pretty girl reclining in the tub.
The process began at six-thirty in the morning and lasted approximately five hours. In the glow of dawn, as the ghost crabs dug their burrows in the sand and the maintenance crews trimmed the golf courses, a sigh of wind rose up from the ground, causing the leaves of the trees to point momentarily into the sky. The wind spread outward from itself, carrying the dank smell of earthworms and mushrooms, like a breath that had been held for far too long. Although the air quickly fell still, this earthy perfume lingered over the islands for some time to come.
It might have been no more than happenstance that, a few minutes later, the streetlights gave one last electric flare before they clicked off—it was daybreak, after all—but when the lampposts wilted like blades of grass it could not be dismissed as coincidence. Their bolts and rivets popped loose with the sound of a thousand hammers striking a thousand anvils. Their light cages sent off sparks as they scraped against the asphalt. The rest of the utility poles followed one by one, an apocalypse of posts and columns, all the traffic signs and electric standards on the islands sagging at their knees, then plummeting to the ground.
There was a pause of nearly half an hour while the land regathered its energies. Then the next phase began. The hotels and resorts where the tourists came to make love twisted on their foundations, drew together, and slipped into the earth like a series of pins—zoop! zoop! zoop! These vast edifices of glass and brick, monuments to the easygoing life of the tropics, left only a few stray mattresses and vending machines to mark their existence. The university and the medical school quickly followed, as did the apparel factories, the office complexes, and the military fortress on Brimstone Hill. Soon the smaller buildings met their end. The stores and restaurants in the capital, the mills of the old sugar colonies, the thousands upon thousands of houses and animal pens—all of them collapsed, pursing together in a puff of nails, shingles, plaster, palm splinters, stones, and copper wire. It was not long before the picket fences that had bordered the houses yielded to the grass as well, curling in on themselves like the tines of a plastic fork transforming into knuckles over a fire.
The streets and railways were the next to succumb to the death spasms of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Every single lane, from the ring roads to the alleys to the runway at the airport, flipped over onto its back, exposing seams of red clay and chunks of black, red, and grey rock. Within seconds, it looked as if the islands had never been marked by so much as a goat path.
Piece by piece, over the hours that followed, the rest of the landscape was bared. The Great Salt Pond wicked slowly into the ocean. The cane fields expelled their stalks like arrows. The rivers and freshwater springs stopped flowing, cascading through the trees and meadows one minute, the next stippled with shallow puddles and astonished-looking minnows arching their bodies against the rocks. The volcanoes did not erupt, but sank into the earth like eyes retreating into a skull. The clouds that had wreathed their summits wobbled slowly into the atmosphere.
One fragment after another, and each in its own way, the land fell dead—the Black Rock cliffs and white sand beaches, the quarries and the rainforests. The racetrack blossomed with millions of yellow dandelions, which immediately went dry and blew away. The sea ports cracked loose from the shore and rode out into the harbour. With a single great heave, the trees and vines of the produce farms were ripped and broken and gathered back into the earth, so that tens of thousands of avocados, apples, and cashews went rolling across the hardpacked soil like marbles dropped onto a concrete floor.
The last structure left standing was the cricket stadium, the bleachers of which came together like a set of teeth, consuming first the field, and then the pitch, and then the wickets.
Finally, shortly after eleven, the entire ground of Saint Kitts and Nevis lifted to a peak, like a tent staked down at its edges, and grew taut. Everything remaining on the surface—park benches and radio transmitters, fire hydrants and golf course flags, the bodies of all the indigenous animals: pigs and vervets, goats and lizards, people and chickens and leatherback turtles—slid with barely a splash into the limitless blue sea, all part of the same dying.
Afterward, the islands subsided to the water.
At noon there came a break in the clouds. The sun shone down on the land that only a few hours before had seemed so lush and full of possibility. Its green places had all gone brown. Two rings of debris stained the ocean around it, a dirty figure eight that reached across the sponges and the coral. As the clouds drifted together again, the stones lining the Atlantic coast, revealed by the sinking tide, rattled for a moment and then fell quiet, as if they had been waiting only to be touched by the light—no more than this—before making their final sound.
The world has been a lesser place since April the 7th of last year, when death befell the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis. It is a terrible and disconcerting sadness to learn that a country so young has relinquished its life. The news cannot help but change you. You huddle together with your friends and loved ones, sipping tea from ceramic mugs, and when someone tells a joke, you laugh more loudly than you should, and when someone squeezes your hand, you do not let go, and all the while you listen to the wind beating against the bricks, and you watch the lights flicker, and you wonder if you will be next. It is fall here, and the leaves are withering on the trees.