The Fall

i.
It was half shining, the sinister lamp-post denial of nature’s reeling system. And yet, all darkness –oppression that soaked the air like lighter fluid in cotton, in spite of the muted flickers of flame that threatened to ignite the tense atmosphere at any moment. She ran, because it was the only thing she could do –the only thing left to the tatters of her mind as she wheeled away from the carnage and scream-clouds displayed and soothed over with the graceful tones of reporters and microphones and dignified lines of print along the edge of the screen. How intricately and fascinatingly obsolete. Her legs were so heavy –heavy with the burden that infected every bared-teeth individual carrying her along like cattle, roiling beneath all their bones. She could feel it –the heat that came only from inside them although their skin was blending into each other as they palpitated as one organism through that corridor of apartment complex that now seemed like a maze –transformed into a labyrinth for their convenience. It was the tingly, blushing heat that reeked of wildness –of fear unadulterated by concern for any other emotion. It was choking them all. She heaved within herself, trying to find the muscle that allowed her to inhale –watching all those identical eyes spasm out of control, spiraling into the chaos that had been secretly embedded in this species all along –just like the world that contained them. 1

They’re all little worlds, she thought, watching their pupils widen over white backdrops until the blackness engulfed everything. She tightened her hold on her sister, raggedly streaming over the knife plunging over and over into her chest cavity, splattering blood onto her surroundings -or perhaps it's only sweat, she thinks. Just harmless see-through drops, like tears. But even she couldn’t tell in the darkness. 2

It was so fast -so unmendably and horrifyingly fast, when they had broken, scrambling like ants onto a landscape only as familiar as their conceptions of hell. She had slender fingers to hold together her own, the voices and breath she had kept tied to herself with dandelion bouquets and sticky-mouthed caresses in lighter times when the world was the size of swing-set velocity and buried treasure was everywhere but hidden and evil had handle-bar mustaches and always went home in chains, while she reveled in her own narrow and blissful goodness. Then it was gone –like the dream that evades your attempts to recapture its plot while you wring your mind out in vain. She couldn’t understand, on her knees as the world groaned beneath her, watching the hand that had been hers to protect staring up like a flower in the rubble. It was no longer chaos that froze her muscles and hardened in her lungs without remorse –it was sudden and excruciating clarity that frosted her eyes over, maliciously hemming in the agony that sobbed and pounded against her ribs to be released, wracking her frame and bruising skin from the inside. Involuntarily silent, she screamed. They were gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. And no matter how many times she repeated it to herself, the word was inadequate. 3

Time has no meaning, really. How do you define it when everything is simply a beginning or an end –and nothing in between? She had no perception of the sand-grains falling, like bodies into the street from the fire-ravaged houses. The sky-scrapers had reached too far, and the punctured universe leaked emptiness into her existence. Behind miles of mind, she felt the hand on her shoulder. Not the touch of the fire-eaters –the ones who raped death with all their might, cheating the remnants of humanity out of their final minutes and hours. A peaceful hand –a cool, liquid-silver calm like ripples through her hair. She turns and stands beneath his wary, haunted eyes. 4

She sinks into him and through him, clutching handfuls of his stained tee-shirt as her wails entwine with the dismembered sirens. He strokes her hair, gently sweeping away sorrow like dross as it seeps from the infection in her mind. She finally glances up, eyes drained of pus and he realizes he has never seen her more beautiful, with tears like pearls strung on dark lashes framing her wide brown eyes and white-and-red light splaying sporadically across her features. He thinks how lucky he is to have found her here –to have her with him in all her earthy, sensual reality while the world disintegrates around them. She slowly continues to inhale and exhale, almost laughing at the memory that a week before, heart bursting and cracking wetly like an overripe fruit with happiness, she had decided it was impossible for her to love him any more than she already did. Now, rotten and dripping with despair, she realizes she took him for granted all along. She loves him with a love beyond love –that human capacity for transcending God time and time again. He takes her hand, and leads her deeper into the ebony. 5

-They melt together into the Neverwhere, in the hope of finding solace on the other side-6

ii.7

They tip-toe-tread through the shadow that has fallen irrevocably over the city they once called home. The air is drenched with smoke, brimming to capacity with cries and other unidentifiable human emissions of sound. If they can make it outside of the city limits, they may save themselves. She shivers at the writhing shapes bleeding through the billows towards them, her skin turning clammy under the sweat that covers her in a feverish sheen of glisten. He tightens his grip, mouth set as hard as it can. Nothing will harm her. 8

Any horror is made inconceivably more terrifying when it is nameless. His bones jolt at the strange cackle from behind as he drags her roughly into a dilapidated alleyway, barely wide enough to breathe with the two of them, shattered remains of black fire-escapes like metal thorns blocking the other exit. They stand, facing each other between the brick wall that stretches up into the deceptively clear midnight sky, his shaking hand pressed against her mouth as she sobs, shuddering into his palm.
The screaming first, and then tearing. The pleading is what poisons her mind, coiling irrepressible terror through her body. He watches as they scratch off the clothes, the mild-looking, middle-aged, balding victim surrounded and naked to destruction. They pull every shred of cloth onto themselves, over their already bloated forms, misshapen with the amount of jacket and ripped denim and traces of business suit packed onto their blackened, leathery skin. Their hysterical laughter coats over his blubbering incantations, as they gather again around his quivering white flesh. He curls around himself hiding his soul if nothing else as they tear at him, revealing red slabs, sliding the pale off inch by inch like the wrapper from a melted chocolate. His cries turn to moans, then sighs, then silence, as they dig and grasp and slice through, sinewy with enthusiasm, foaming at the mouth and traces of prey running down their chins. 9

Humans without hope become the animals they claim to have mastered. 10

Hardly sated, but wearied with the residual barriers to their insanity, the fire-eaters shriek at the cadaverous veil of the moon, her cold disapproval disappearing inexplicable behind the horizon. She is first to fall. 11

He relaxes his hand from her mouth, holding her as they sag together, his palm still moist from her ardent breathing as he steadies himself on the brick behind her head. He looks up, trying to stem the flow of murder and madness imprinted on his eyes. She catches the light that glints across the liquid creeping from the corners, and curious, gazes also into the narrow slice of night above them. Another white drop of fire begins to spiral slowly. She doesn’t register its import, staring with fascination at the bit of down. It wafts like spit in the breeze, coming closer and closer until it bursts into a lily of conflagrant orange across the cobalt blue of the familiar. Then another appears. Then another. She gasps as she wraps her mind around the fact that the sky is falling, that the very pieces of sanity she thought had been retained were in fact coming down all around them like the existence they once used as shelter. Nowhere to hide anymore, she thinks. 12

They feel the quaking of distant impacts, the world dancing with scarred hands raised high under a rain of fire. He sets one of the countless wayward strands of her hair behind her ear as she looks down and realizes they are both crying again. It’s as if their last definition of finality has been crossed, eternity forced down their throats like their own thoughts. He takes a deep, querulous breath, as he touches her chin softly, then presses his thumb into the hollow beneath the curve of her lip, bringing her face up so her eyes continue to reflect the snowflake-storm of stars as she gazes at him with despair and desperation intertwined. Her uncertainty dissipates in a sharp intake of breath as he molds his lips into hers, draining the air from her gasp, closed eyes belying the sense of urgency in his moistened mouth, in his tongue, in his teeth. 13

She keeps her eyes wide open, as his hands move from her compliant face to her hips, fingertips only slightly immersed in the waistband of her ripped jeans, pulling her relentlessly closer, wrinkling the cotton cloth of her top upward until there are no layers hiding the taut skin stretched over the bones of her pelvis from his own torso. He surrounds her with heat as she unfolds like a butterfly against him. She curls her fingers into the cluster of hair at the back of his neck and weeps with the heavens as he slides tingling trails of expectation under her shirt and caresses her breasts in spirals of tender swelling, then pushes her up into the wall, impressing her spine into the brick that no longer feels rough against her skin. They breathe fire –like dragons –rasping mouthfuls of glory over each other again and again, his lips pressed hot and slightly ajar against the exposed curve of her collar bone as the stars sail in dusty explosions overhead and swim through shards of atmosphere to their earthly graves.14

And miraculously, when the last light flickers and blows out amidst the birthday cake of sky, they remain panting beneath the utter emptiness of the leftover black and the dizzy, lonely revolving of the planet. 15

He looks at her solemnly, his eyes clear and bright with passion. “Are you ready?”16

“Yeah.” she whispers without dignity, somewhat overwhelmed by their continued existence and the fact that most of her fear has ceased anyway.17

-She has never been comfortable with physical affection, frightened –terrified –by the one thing that had always robbed her completely of her immaculate control; but now, in the end of all things, she feels only love –even in that gut-wrenching facet of desire –like a bruise unapologetically throbbing near her lungs and blazing in her throat. She pushes off the wall as he steps tentatively into the darkness then reaches out for her. He brushes one final suction of kiss across her lips as they set off through the mist.18

Tranquil and lucid beneath the drained midnight of the Everclear, they stride hand in hand through a plain of ever-increasing entropy.19

iii.20

It is impossible –impossible –to comprehend this –their minds strain from the weight. The hill sways beneath their feet as if to punctuate their astonished stances, coated with that ridiculous green grass, gleaming fake as the delusion they’d had of surviving this mess. Behind them, coated in ashes is the city they’d left to the cannibal hordes and before them, strangling them through their eyes and assaulted nostrils lies an unending panorama of the death that preceded them. Fire after fire dots miles of barely perceptible wreckage, hazed over with mushrooms of dust and magma-smoke as far as their eyes stretch over the landscape. 21

And beyond the beyond the beyond, a dawn of white-hot light like a sneer on the horizon –the sun, so incorrect in its position it makes her sick to her stomach as she sinks, crumpling to the ground like a discarded manuscript. They hadn’t realized how fast the earth had been spinning –the confusion had consumed them as it was, their heads churning with the instinct to survive and not to feel the ground being flung into sporadic patterns as they ran. It rises above them, the all-powerful, ever-nearing god of the day, plunging them into high-noon brightness like diamonds rough on their skin before it fades behind them in a ten-minute twilight. 22

“No.” she says, her fist pressed to her mouth, kneading knuckle marks as she attempts to regain control of her lungs. He sits beside her, dumbfounded and struggling valiantly to overcome the sudden dread that clogs his lungs like phlegm. They were always doomed.23

She breathes in an incredulous wheeze, half-moaning but not yet running with visible tears. He touches her shoulder and she fractures into his arms as he cradles her again, his fingers in her hair, and his voice soothing as he cracks over the only lie he knows to tell her. “It’s alright. It’ll be alright.”24

A mewling and guttural sob rips from her throat as she continues to reconcile her struggling desire for life with the stomach-sucking knowledge that death is imminent regardless. “Why? Why?” she mutters to him, choked with hysteria like marbles on her larynx.25

He doesn’t know. One hand holds back the sobs behind his eyes while the other tries to bring her closer to him –as if that were possible. He wanted the world to go on. He wanted the universe to make room for them for a little while –if only for that tiny span called mortality –so that he could be with her in it. 26

“There is always a reason, sweetie. The point is that we lived.”27

“Where is the point? I don’t see a fucking point.” She collapses again into herself, throwing her face downward resentfully.28

He looks up, slowly, tilting her chin as he thinks. “I loved you, Crimson. Fuck, I love you. I waited for you my entire life, praying to the god I didn’t even believe in that I would find SOMETHING. Fucking anything. A reason to go on at all. I lived through this hell of vague humiliation and friends and family that didn’t actually see or care to see me. I never thought that the solace I begged the sky for so fucking hard every night would be as flawless as you, but you are. You are my depth of grace. And here you are within arm’s reach, wheeling with me on top of the world as we make our last stand. The thing is, Crimson… I got to touch you, to hold you, to kiss you –to dig my fingers into your thought processes and at least begin to understand every square inch of your mind and your hopes and your dreams. I think… Crimson, you are the point. YOU justify my existence.”29

She blinks back her tears, staring without expression. Then without warning, she launches herself forward into him, hands interlocked behind his head and mouth planted firmly on his. She has no idea who is more surprised by this –she has never initiated anything before. Her fear had always controlled her, always repressed this suddenly obvious knowledge that SHE wants HIM. Her revolutionary moment fades as he draws his face away from hers a bit, completely taken aback. 30

She stutters, her resolution whipping like a candle-wick. “I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t… I’m sorry about that… I don’t know…” She tries to fight his gaze, looking to the side and down and willing him not to lift her face again. 31

“Stop apologizing.” He says. And waits.32

She looks at him, finally, his head still cocked to one side and that customary, knowing smile curving his lips. Behind her, the sun appears again across the skyline, moving rapidly over her head in a halo of fire.33

“I love you.” she says, still nervous, but determined. “I love you in every possible sense of the word. And… I’m so very awful at expressing it. I’m so very awful at showing it… look at me. This is the end of the fucking world and I’m struggling to get this out.” She pauses, fiddling with her hands and glancing up shyly to gauge his reaction. “You make me want to be the person I always should have been. You make me see myself as beautiful, even when I’m facing a mirror. Or when I have my back to a brick wall as every single fucking star in the sky is falling out of its place in the universe. You make me feel safe when the world is burning and there’s not a single fucking hope for any security at all. You gave me the stars, Indigo… and I want you to have all of me in return. I want to give you myself, in my entirety… Fuck it. You can have me. You can lick my bones clean.”34

Her voice fades out as she nears the end, morphing into a whisper as she makes her odd little statement, feeling all the
embarrassment possible that she has offered herself to him as if she was some incredible gift that makes up for all the times he has saved her in this ridiculously short life-span. What she meant was that she was totally and completely his already. He had only to reach out and take whatever he wanted.35

He moves closer, pulling her into an embrace, her head heavy on his shoulder as she continues to cringe with chagrin. He whispers velvet in her ear, an earnest, raw request for clarification. “Are you asking me… to make love to you?” 36

She freezes, watching time the indefinable wheel around the world before her eyes, watching his eyes turn green in the darkness, watching his lips move apologetically without sound and watching herself as she rises up and soars into the universe, the last star.37

“Yes.”38

She feels everything. Every breath of contact as he slips off her stiffened clothes –rippling along her skin –throws her nerve-endings haywire. Her shirt first, then jeans, discarded on the grass in a forlorn little heap. She helps him undo his belt, sliding it out slowly and dropping it with her clothes. Then his shirt, she flattens her palms against his chest as he reaches behind her for the plain white bra, widening her eyes with fear and foolish astonishment as it unhooks beneath his fingers, pulled out from her side and dangled as he takes in her collar bone and slides his gaze down smoothly along the skin of her stomach and then hips. 39

She closes her eyes so he can’t see her as the long, slow sick of elastic draws down her legs raising goose bumps. 40

She’s feared his verdict on this blushing length of exposure as much as she’s loathed her own since she realized that she was in love with him. She opens her eyes as he traces a finger down one defined breast, still kneeling, and over the subtle curve of her hip to the inside of her thigh. Her breathing is ragged and uneven, making the heat in her face turn even more blatant. He exhales slightly against the pale vulnerability of her upper, inner leg, the condensation of his breath weeping into solid moonlight. “You’re beautiful.”41

She would have remembered this, every absentminded sensation, had it not been the end of her planet and her life within a few hours. The drops of dew that weaved through her silky hair like jewels, crowning her as he took her lips in his own and absorbed the first cry she truly gave to him. How her eyes, wide with confusion saw past him into the secrets of the galaxies unfurled before them for the first time. How he drew the scream like poison from a wound, reverberating from the depths of her solar plexus, kissing her forehead as she clutched at him, the smell of smoke in her veins and Indigo all around her and his fresh-morning-melting-into-first-flowers essence that had somehow permeated her entire being. She had never felt so full.42

So she lay with a startled, open mouth as the sun bathed them in gold, giving him her first time as he gave her his last while their earth plummeted beneath them, indifferent to the love that pumped equally between them and intertwined their flesh. She sighed, and curled up into his chest, her nakedness no longer anything but a smile of warmth against him. He smiles back, chin resting on top of her head, and arms wrapped around the muddy scent of her soul, like rain on sidewalks. She sings, pouring herself into the haunting melancholy of her voice as he drifts off to sleep. Somehow, neither of them cares that they will never wake up.43

She sings her battle cry, the song her mother taught her when she cried out in the darkness as a child, shrouded in the nightmares that had always clouded her sleep. 44

When my enemies lie
like leaves of a tree in autumn
staining the ground
blood-red,
when victory soothes
my racing blood,
when it rests
like honey on my lips;
I will raise up my voice.
The words of my song
will dance on the wind
like an eagle.
The long-dormant strains
will shake out their wings,
reclaiming their skies
Once again. My sword will hum
to the victory chant.
My eyes will lift up
Painting in my mind
the blue sky without clouds.45

Her voice becomes stronger as she strokes the fine, golden hair of his broad arm and the brown flesh of the world ruptures and blisters into magma scars, bleeding her heart out into the dust that will fly through the emptiness she faces... and she wonders if it might not be so empty anymore. 46

I like to think that as the world collided with its star, and annihilated its own elements in an explosion of flame and dream, one last clear note rang out and still echoes through space like a lost child in a mother’s memory.47

Painting in my mind
the blue sky without clouds.