You're an old man now, with bones like glass and muscles akin to sandpaper, and you finally drag the last body into your God's grave. You stop and heave, coughing, leaning forward on your knees. Perhaps you should take a short rest before you continue.

You sit down on the edge of the grave, your feet dangling. Maggots writhe below your toes, their meal rotting beneath their jaws, the stench of it potent enough to kill. Lucky, that; it meant none would live to find this grave. You breathe in deep, and your nose barely twitches. You've worked here for... well, it hardly matters. That which governed time is dead. Point is, you've gotten used to it.

You are the last thing to age. Nothing has grown, nothing has sprouted, nothing has evolved since God had died. Only you have changed, the last one standing.

Or sitting, you suppose. You push yourself from the ground and get your rope. You find a tree and fasten it, then lower yourself into the grave.

Clean-eaten bone cuts into your feet and half-rotten flesh squishes under your soles. Mold gets stuck between your toes. An intact pupil in a decayed iris stares up at you; its other socket is filled with water, flies playing in its pool. Rain still falls. Your God had not governed the skies. Perhaps time still exists there, too, and birds only age in the air. You don't actually know. You'd never had an interest in bird watching, and burying had taken up your life.

You've wondered, sometimes, while bent under a dead man's weight, what other people were doing. How did they live, freed from time, immortal and unchanging? Days still passed — sun, moon, forces not born from Earth did not suddenly perish with your mortal God — but you imagine that to a timeless being, such blackening and brightening is meaningless. Did they still buy and sell? Did they still meet and laugh? Did they still create? You wish you could see it, wish you could see wood change under the hands of a sculptor or the silence change to a singer's tune. The closest you got was the rot, the mold, the maggots, changing the grave from a corpse to a skeleton.

With a shock, it occurs to you no, no that's not all you have. The grave has filled. You fed the grave until it filled, bloating almost beyond its walls, changed it from dirt to bone. You have created art.

You grin, whistle a hearty tune. It's a nice thought.

Death surrounds you. God is buried deep beneath, but it doesn't rot. It still clings, a tiny spark, the undead walking with you. God is not a man; it is many who believe in it. You have put it off, but there is no death without a grave and besides, it deserved at least this honor.

You unsheathe your knife and plunge it into your neck. God heaves and stutters, blood filling its throat, searching for breath, but all it finds is the taste of rot. The last it sees is its own eye, half-decayed, staring as it dies.