by Lara Noel

Through the fire all along the graves, lined up like good little girls and boys amidst the backdrop of Satan’s reign.  Underneath the shadow of the moon, the curse grows and begins to filter through the veil. Total destruction of flesh and mind is ready to unwind; leaving the sewers filled with blood, the streets and woods with cadavers piled high. Eyes gauged out by one’s own hand, entrails snaking away from shredded abdomens, half eaten hearts in the palms of dirt coated blue hands.

This is what we all deserve. We are reaping what we have sewn, and this time there is no rising from the ashes. The hellhounds are unchained and crimson paints the sky. Veins begin to twitch. Hands become claws. Mouth waters to taste raw flesh while the mind slowly focuses on one purpose, to kill.

From town to town, the curse travels like the plague. Soon enough there will be no living souls. Not one single breath heard anywhere. It will only be the sound of the wind and rain, the thunder striking the earth, the waves crashing against the shores. Once upon a time like it always was and perhaps should have been. A landscape with souls floating like orbs denied any vessel and destined to be like the flickering stars, stoic and silent, admired from a distance.

In time, there will be few remnants of the corpses; muscle and skin devoured, whatever the scavengers leave behind, decayed; bones slowly receding into the ground to be broken down into unrecognizable fragments.  Once again the animals shall roam the earth in their fullest capacity without interference by our kind. They will walk along the graves, the unmarked graves of our putrid generations, our concrete, metal and steel civilizations all crumbling to dust, being taken back by the flora.

The shadows will retread into the roots of the trees, deep inside the caves of every mountainside, into the abyss of the caverns in the sea. Black winged birds will paint the skies at every dusk and doves at every dawn. This world was simply a place for us all to die. The stones and metals shall be returned to the earth with this massacre that we earned from the first time hunger for power and greed manifested inside the human brain. Our brains, what a beautiful configuration that no one ever took the time to fully understand. Genocide after genocide, trips to outer space and yet we knew so little about what was inside our own heads.

Satan is weeping along the graves as we fade away. We disappointed our one and only believer and now we are nothing but those who once were, the creators of the scabs scattered along the landscape. The angels and demons did not interfere with the destiny we aided. In the cusp of wings and curve of onyx eyes, the curse was reflected and recorded; the legendary fall of Satan’s children who were fated to become nothing but scars.

I can’t see through the fog between me and the rest of them. It clouds my vision and everything I’ve been told so. Nothing in the rearview but a faded journal with the blood of a decade I longer want to remember. It casts its pale sanctuary in front of my eyes, encapsulating a glow better left for when the world is over; the fires gone out, a violet sky painting the world under an elusive shadow. Into the wood and under the moon, along the graves I slither.

I will be my own release, reeling in pain. I let the pain in full. Inside.  Awake. I won’t forget the call. Streaming inside me, cloudless spirits confined here.  

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