The music drooling from her speakers is pure syrup. Vocals distorted to ghoulish slowness, bass pulled taut, pounding in her ears louder than her heartbeat. It hurts, threatens to burst her eardrums from the force of it. With her head on her desk, she can almost touch the popcorn wall in front of her with outstretched hands, chipping holo polish, her pinkie finger grazing a tacky remnant of some substance (spilled soda, maybe?) long since dried into sludge. If she moved her body a few inches to either side, dirty skin would brush up against balled aluminum, torn snack packets, drink cans crumpled into abstract art. She’s carved out a space for herself, a two-foot diameter zone of desk space to press her cheek against and leak bloodied saliva onto.

Why move? Her fingers flex, dried worms spasming against plastic. Desiccated yet swollen things, left out too long and spoiled without any somatic warning. The room at present glows comforting mint green, crawling slow into pale blue as it phases through each chromatic shade. It’s motion in itself; it’s movement; it’s alive. The light glints off chipped holo pink, dry-blood crusted around hangnails, mesmerizing; the kind of thing you can look at for hours without registering the passage of time. Time passes. She thinks. 

One creaking hand stretches to her laptop. Her favorite playlist is more than a thousand videos long. Her speakers ooze pretty rave girl - daycore deeper ver and it’s in her chest, sticking to the inside of her ribs. She never has to turn it off. It might have been the last hardest thing she did, the hours of searching for links and sticking them into online converters. She’s curated enough to last her through an apocalypse that’s sure to be coming.

She knows because the angel visited her again last night. More urgent. A beautiful thing with transparent butterfly wings and the saddest fucking expression. Looking at her how you look at a dog that’s about to be put down. The last week or so of its life, when you can’t stop looking at it and holding back tears, still smiling as not to worry it. It worried her anyway.

The angel sat itself on the side of her desk, the refuse passing through its body like a knife through water. It didn’t swing its legs like she would have done. She couldn’t chalk this up to a shadow-self, manifestation of the subconsciousness, or any other bullshit. It was placid and perfect in its stillness. It kept its hands clasped, fingers curled in on each other, as it looked at her. 

She looked up the wings later. They belonged to amber phantoms, Haetera piera, rimmed in tawny brown with eyespots on the bottom. How could she have known that, if she didn’t look them up. 

And why would she have needed to do that, if it wasn’t the end of the world.

She stares at a half-finished edit on her internet browser. Her screen is so gross. Caked in dust and god knows what else. Underneath the layer of particulate matter there’s sparkle, strobing hearts and diamond glitter. It’s something to look at. More motion. The heart in the bottom corner rotates in and in and in on itself, surrounded by sparkling aldehyde swirls. She might have recognized the people underneath the strobe once, but their faces are streaked with drying-something and lost to her now. 

She sits because it’s more comfortable to sit. It’s fine to reach out and touch the back wall of her room with her fingers, spine keeled over and cramped and fused into an S. There’s damp under her arms and between her pressed-together thighs, sticky on her cheek melted into plastic, sap leaking from one eye. Why get up and lie down? She hasn’t changed her sheets for weeks on weeks and she tells herself it’s because she likes the smell of her own skin, the must and oil and sweat. If she goes and lies down she won’t ever get up, suffocating in dander and skin mites. Wrapped on all sides and curled into a damp ball. It’s better to sit, with hard plastic against her back and her watery eye discharging tears onto the desk.

The angel asked her a question and she’s trying not to think about it. It wasn’t a chatty thing. But it sounded like the voices from the flash games she played as a kid, the amateur voice work which skipped and crackled in her school-issued headphones. A clarion where the highest peaks clip the microphone and the lowest are muddied in noise and attenuation. 

It’s ending. Aren’t you going to move?

The song crossfades out and switches over, bleeding into the next as slow as the shifting rainbow lights. Feedback pops and whines, hurts her ears, hurts her stomach. It reverberates off the crinkled aluminum and traps her within a soundscape of crackling noise, a pot boiling over and fizzing onto cold metal stovetop. Despite everything, the memory makes warmth pool low in her gut, twisting her bowels, as she remembers the angel’s voice, the glowing palinopsia of its silhouette, the cold burn of its limbs as they drifted near her prone body, never actually making contact. A Lichtenberg figure, a ghostly nervous system, an incandescent arrangement of axons and holy wiring. She wanted it to brush over her shoulders, pull the blanket up over her back where it had fallen, crumpled, down the back of her chair. All that she is now, unclean flesh and fabric, the angel’s touch might set her alight, cleansing. 

But her body wouldn’t burst into flame, a dry burn like a tree, reducing all matter to clean ash. It would melt instead, slow and agonizing, like a candle. Even in the bright touch of an angel she can’t avoid an end that drags.

It didn’t touch her, either way. It sat, watching her, its body statue-still with hands clasped, and then it disappeared. It didn’t say anything the first time, just looked at her. She supposes this is progress of a sort. A bad thing, to progress towards the end of the world. For all of this to end. To stop feeling the insect-egg texture of the wall in front of her, the ache of her curled back, the pulsing heat in her lower muscles. 

It would be bad because she likes it here.

god is a girl - s l o w e d drips from the speakers. Something smells really bad. It was soda, which she spilled that long ago, let congeal into a sticky pink puddle. It spread to her sketchbook and the pages got glued down, so now she can’t draw anymore until she gets up for a new one. It’s not that big of a loss. When she looks at the bodies she drew she feels sick. The limbs don’t look right. She wants them dearly. 

It’s ending. Aren’t you going to move?

The world is ending and she just wants to sit here. She’s spent so long worrying, and for a while the worry was just outside her door, buffeted by the sickly crunching of her speaker and the whirring of her laptop fan. Sore, broken skin on the soles of her feet. The fat of her upper arms aches and oozes. She didn’t even need to talk to anyone. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. It was fine. She’s fine with not having been kissed or touched or fucked soft before the world ends. It’s fine. 

If the world ended she’d have to stop this. She’d have to turn off her music and get up and do something about it. Be scared about it. She’d lose her sheets and the plush caterpillar she’s slept with since she was two, the crushed cans of strawberry and her hoodie now stained from food and snot and spit. Her shorts have ridden up and the exposed skin adheres to the plastic of her chair, hot and inflamed and red. 

It feels gross to think about how the angel would touch her there. The crackle of electric fingers pulling themselves apart from their entanglement to lift her up, and the angel could be corporeal this time, for her. The angel holding the inside of her legs apart, splitting her, melting her from the inside with itself. The angel holding her head in its hands, leaving fingerprints like flicking wires burnt into her cheeks, like tree branches. Its wings would flutter, she thinks, as it moved, but slowly, like at rest. She could touch them, and it would let her, and it would feel like a membrane of skin, elastic and taut. She wants to stroke the place where the wings join with the nerves, hold her arms behind its back as it presses the loop of its head into her neck and burns her there, too. It would try to hold her gentle, but it can’t and that would be okay, because its hands aren’t accustomed to this kind of prayer. Gross. Gross.

The walls are pulsing. It’s slight, but it’s there. Throbbing with a heartbeat. Flexing inward like someone’s leaning their weight on the outside. The lights make it all clearer, the bend of it, as it presses up against the tips of her outstretched fingers. Blue, green, red, sickly tangerine, pushing back on her skin like inflating rubber. She’s gotta be dreaming, or the world is ending, and it’s what she’s been waiting for. 

If the world is ending then she doesn’t have to move. She doesn’t need to get up, because it doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter that she’s never been touched, never been held, hasn’t seen another human for four straight months. She doesn’t even have anyone to think about, as the walls warp and spasm around her. 

She doesn’t want to leave her room. She promised herself she won’t have to. It’s a chrysalis, it’s an incubator, it’s turning her into fucking soup. The discordant crispness of her music and the bass in her chest hurts her ears and the hinge of her jaw, and fuck, is the world really ending to super psycho love? 

Let it end. Let it end and let her stay here forever and ever and ever. 

Because that’s what she wants. She has to. There isn’t any room on this cluttered desk for anything else except decay.

The speakers hiss and curdle and she knows the angel is back. Her turned head, with the crick in its neck facing the wall, is looking directly up at it. Her eyes hurt, looking at it, but they aren’t burning. One still feels a little wet, sort of dried up but gooey still. The angel’s perfect head looks back down at her, sees her, and does not cry. It doesn’t move either, a shimmering and static thing. 

Are you ready to go?

do i have to? 

Her lips don’t move, but it can hear her. She knows. It only looks at her. Even the butterfly wings don’t flutter, motionless in a perfect obtuse angle from the center of its back. Her eyes fuzz over, sharpen as she focuses, and she sees for the first time the eyespots clipping the corners of its wings. They stare back at her, panes of glass reflecting the flickering utero light. They aren’t familiar. They aren’t her eyes. 

Do you want to?

no.

It feels familiar, coming out of her. To stay, with her music and the lights and her blankets and flash game websites. It’s love. A heavy love which weighs down her limbs and presses her feet into the carpet, her head into the desk, as everything leaks out of her, slick and hot, her whole being hemorrhaging until she seeps into the room itself. What would it take, to be worthy of that love? Does she get to like the feeling, now that it’s over?

Do you mean that?

i. i think so?

She wants to push her hand fully into the wall, tear the cells and let whatever’s behind them gush. Create a new hole without having to move, curl up into the space she’s torn open and let herself become part of the insulation. Seal herself up and become organic, never move again, swaddled on all sides with pulsing flesh and stucco. Why move? Why move? Why move?

What’s left?

Her music. Her lights. Her blankets.

The trash on her desk. The soda she spilled. Her broken speakers. Her shitty laptop. Her caterpillar plush. 

It’s soup. It’s refuse. A snake inside its own shed skin, blind and parasitic. 

But it’s okay, because the snake likes its parasites, they’re familiar and they stay with the snake forever and ever. The shed skin is tight and keeps it safe. The caterpillar likes being soup.

i. She might be crying. Everything feels wet. i’ve never been, uh. touched? or, like, kissed, or anything. i don’t have, like. friends?

The angel remains placid. Silent.

if i come with you, can we? i mean, can i, um. is there anything else? do we get to be saved? now that the world is ending? do we get to go somewhere better? 

 do i get to be anything else?

She doesn’t want to say it, but everything now is slick and hot and the thoughts pour out anyway. She’d reach out her hand, try to touch it, but her shitty body won’t move right and all she can do is stare unblinking at the angel, the flickering being carving her world into strips, but it’s okay, because it’s all ending and everybody gets to know about it. There’s nothing else, so pull her useless body up and kiss her, okay? Let her have it! There isn’t going to be anything else, so now she gets to know what it feels like to be loved!

And the angel laughs. 

The world isn’t ending, you silly bitch. You are. Do you want to drag everyone else down with you?

🦷🦷🦷  

It can take up to an hour for a butterfly to emerge fully from its chrysalis. She thinks she learned that from her biology class, maybe, when she was younger and happier and still went outside. The thin shell breaks, but the butterfly still needs time to unfurl, expand its wings and let its liquid body harden with exposure to the air. Gives itself false hope, a brief moment where it gets to be more than soup, before it inevitably gets eaten by a bird or a frog or something. Swallowed whole into a room of skin that pulses in time with a heartbeat.

A human body doesn’t burn. It melts. Becomes syrup, melds with the strawberry slick on her desk, oozes, sweet and stagnant. Stays where she is, safe and sound, sinking putrefaction into  plastic. Even the touch of an angel can’t erase that from the walls of her room.

Isn’t it nice, to know exactly what’s expected of her? Isn’t that better? Shouldn’t she be happy, in that certainty?

Of the two, isn’t it much preferable to rot?

👼🐛