Where Have the Rainbows Gone?

She sat at the window by the deck. Outside the earth was screaming, howling, the ocean crying and the clouds shooting lightning into her heart. She remembered artificial dreams and candy-cane kisses and she wondered if it had passed or if it was coming again, a merry-go-round of love and loss, brilliant colors and shattered neutrals. She stared at the blackness, listened to the dying screeches and thought maybe, just maybe the world was folding into itself, collapsing, and she thought maybe she would go willingly.

She felt as if she had seen the beginnings and endings of time, and maybe she had. She remembered his cold eyes and the wishes she so foolishly made on his diamond rings. He had been hard candy in human form, a mysteriously prophetic vision from her then acid-tripped daydreams and forlorn fantasies. They had swum together beneath the ocean's waves and felt as though it would never, could never end. As though death had just missed them with his all-consuming poison and when they surfaced they would be Adam and Eve and they would never die, but coexist forever and ever with the changing leaves and trees, far past the night, into reality's dawn.

She laughed, and it was tinged with a sharp edge of bitterness. She had fallen for the hoax. She had held onto him as the world spun beneath her feet and lost her footing when he dove off over the cliff, never to be seen again. Lightning lit up the ocean like his eyes had lit up her heart and the foreboding sky raged against the water, a bitter battle between opposing and jealously belligerent brothers. She closed her eyes and saw stars, stars that had long since imploded and spun from reach.

The world deserved to end. She remembered the naivety of her youth, when she saw flowers instead of weeds, heard laughing instead of sobbing, tasted happiness instead of death. She had seen the calm and missed the chaos. Once there were cotton-candy sunrises. Now there were only half-hidden sunsets, lost behind the smoggy, heavy clouds, so full of acid-rain that they looked like they would burst. Once she believed streetlamps were magic and dancing in the rain was worth the soaked clothes and pneumonia. Now all that was left of the world were corrupt clowns, leering and jeering, and dark, dank carverns filled with the worst kind of monsters, and the air was filled with the stench of putrid and decomposing flesh. The world deserved to end.

She watched the raging storm quietly. The lightning looked to her like a confused arrow that didn't know which way to go. She wished vaguely that it had something to focus on. It was destruction at its best, no regard for good or evil. She wished that she could be the lightning. Emotionless, uncaring. The only good way to go through life. "There is no pain where there is no feeling," she said aloud to the silence surrounding her. She was stuck in a hollow encasement of nothing.

She had never liked being alone, but it was where she best belonged; she, with her daisy-ridden daydreams and faerie wings hidden beneath the facade of normalcy. She, with glitter in her hair and eyes that once sparkled silver and lavender. She, who didn't fit in with the corruption of the world.

She had been a pretty dream of a girl, lost in the cumulus clouds and sunshine of youth. Wherever she was, the sun smiled and rainbows wrote their stories across the skies. Flowers bloomed and grass grew.

He had been a pretty nightmare of a boy. Rainclouds followed him and he was the posterboy for anger and lightning-lit death storms like this one. When he smiled, the air grew cold and his eyes were like ice. Sadness followed him like a lost puppy. She wanted to cure him.

She thought that her love canceled out his hate, but instead his hate destroyed her love.

"The world deserves to end," she said, opening the door to the deck and walking head on into the battle. She stood on the railing, facing the ocean, and raised her arms, a living, glittering, glowing lightning rod. The ocean crashed with the sky around her and the lightning streaked through the sky. Her hair was lit up in a golden, fiery halo as she stood defiant, prepared for martyrdom. In the last moment she saw a reflection of herself, a disillusioned and deflowered faerie who had forgotten that she had wings. Once she could have flown away, but now she just closed her eyes and listened to the implosion of the earth.

"Where have all the rainbows gone?" she whispered unhappily, her voice hardly escaping her throat as she looked into the rain. "Were they even there to begin with?"

The lightning enveloped her body in sheer, brilliant electricity and she was erased as quickly and painlessly as she had been created. Her glass window shattered and the half-hearted shelter flew into the ocean, the wood splintering and driving holes into the water.

Slowly but surely all the love in the world disappeared into a hypotizing, black whirlpool, and all that remained was the boy beneath the ocean and the poison spreading from his fingertips. He stood still, as emotionless as the lightning above him, and watched as the sky above him grew blacker and the people on the streets grew angrier.

"They've been erased," he said, smiling coldly.