To Die of Beauty

The thing is, the Apocalypse kind of went tits up. There was fire and brimstoning, trumpets blaring, people disappearing, and then, Us. The left behinds, the nothings, the unbelievers. Souls too hollow to be worth anything.

Nothing green grows anymore. Nothing living lives. So, we all aimlessly drift, stuck alongside the freaks left behind when heaven and hell closed their gates. We’ve learned nothing from our exile from paradise, so the freaks get locked away in little cages or cramped caravans, and bored, useless nothings like me come to stare at them.

This sideshow is a corny setup. A single chair sits in the middle of a small, high-top tent, red and white pinstripes melting into darkness. There’s a glass case in the middle of the room, lined with enough fake gold filigree to glint even in the low light. A shadow moves within.

A bright white glare washes away my sight. I wince and turn away. When I look back the shadow is illuminated, holding a pull switch, and spreading—

—her downy hawk wings.

Red plump lips, sticky blood vessels, slick candy gloss. I’m thinking, Gabriel Dante Rossetti: white-cheeked, heavy-lidded, corn-silk hair and vacant, vapid O-faces.

My chest burns with blue-hot feathered flames. Licking, eager and wanting. Not for anything as base as sex but … admiration. Inspiration. Maybe even creation. For the first time since the world ended, I compose colors in my head, symphonies of shadow and light, wet pliable globs and streaks of harmonious paint.

Then I think: What’s it matter? The world’s over. There’s no more room for art. There wasn’t room even when the world was alive.

“Why are you here?” I ask, because I haven’t had it in me to feel wonder while sleepwalking through the post-credits. “Why didn’t you go back with the rest?”

The angel’s words are hideous, but her voice is another chorus of glittering hues, purple starblooms and sun-searing yellow. “I ate the souls I was meant to take to God.”

I laugh. A rasping, creaking thing. “You can have mine,” I say. Her dewy, owl-blinking eyes are dark as a panther’s coat. “I’ll let you out and you can have it.”

She cocks her head, an alien, avian movement. “Why?”

I throw out my arms, let her see my color-stained coat, my ink-blotted shirt, the black-charcoal creases of my hands. “Because I want to die of beauty.”

“Deal,” she hisses, her feathers flaring in excitement. I break the glass and there is red— glorious, Pompeian red in glitters of rainbow shards, more red as she dives for my mouth and—

—sucks down my sorry soul. Worthless no more.