Sudden Short Story 105

"It's quite cosmopolitan, don't you think?" he asked her, as they both looked around. 
"It's almost like a marketplace, but without the scarcity," she replied. 
So many races were here that it was hard to decide with whom to interact first.  There were even pattern-beings propagating themselves along the walls! 
The couple wandered through the area, looking around excitedly, until he felt her tug on his hand. 
"I'm sorry," she said as he turned around.  Starting with her left eye, she began to turn to stone.  "Despite my training, I thought of that place, all those star-ages ago." 
He embraced her suddenly, then pulled back to look into her eyes.  One last tear ran out of his left eye as he, too, began to turn to stone.  "It was called Earth." 
"Why did you think of it, too?" she asked.  "You could have made it."  Those were her final words, as the left half of her face turned to stone, and it raced down her left half. 
"What would have been the point of that?  Now, neither of us has to be alone.  I just hope that someone thinks to preserve the statues that once were the last humans." 
Stone raced down his left, too, and finally crossed her line of symmetry.  They positioned what parts of themselves they could carefully, so that they stood stably, and so that they would hold each other forever. 
Her last sight was of his stone left eye, and his of hers.