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Not death itself, but what waits for the body afterward.
her features had bloomed somehow. Were more alive and luscious, like a show rose at the very peak of maturity, moments before it begins to lose its first petal. Under all that velvet, a certain hardness had crept around her eyes,
glaring at her with bristling malice, all pink and grey and needle teeth.
Every part of her that meant anything was miles across town, looking for a way to get inside and set up a new home.
A god had died in its sleep, and now everyone was back to staring at themselves.
Deadpan alley had an echo.
A gathering of the disaffected creates a feeding frenzy for so many things.
while the smell of death hovered into the background like a humming motor that the ear no longer hears.
“It’s awful.” “It is necessary.”
“Superstitions grow like a virus. Age and retelling does not a fact make.”
It feigned insult, a bruised vanity.
“No, what we give, what we inflict, is not life. It is an eternal waking death.”
the blackness of its eyes so much darker than the room around it that they appeared to be two holes punched into the night.
We are the core. We are the root.” “Of what?” “We are the beginning. You are the end of it. The destroyer.”
The sickness was gone, cured by death. Her heart did not pound, nor did it beat much at all. But she felt alive with fever, consumed by it, a trillion of her new brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers coursing inside her veins, repurposing her genetic code and providing a new form of life that her body did not yet understand.
Sounds and sensations bombarded her newly powered receptors, and her parietal lobe exploded with the sensual nectar of hearing and tasting and sensing the physical world stripped raw for the first time, as if the safety plastic had been pulled off and she was finally getting to the real thing. She wanted to tongue kiss the universe. She wanted to eat every living soul on this tiny fucking planet.
