‘Oh, hello!’
And then there was nothing.
Sounds continued as they ever did, but the finality of an ending never appeared. Nothing that radiated itself again and again.
Feet trekked on cobbled streets, the wind played its melody through scattered leaves, millions of internal dialogs ran circles inside the minds of a still existing human race.
‘I was sure that would work.’ A disappointed figure in robes put down her blood-streaked knife. Now beginning the stages of pre-panic, she considered her sheep knuckles, laid in the sigil of apocalypse. ‘That should be the symbol…’ Marla stared blankly at a page of arcane text and was now beginning to doubt its authenticity. Attempting to maintain a facade of calm, she began flicking through the tome in search of answers, or at least a helpful diagram.
‘Could I go then?’ croaked a voice from her kitchen table come sacrifice altar -the bloodied man’s stab wound failing to hinder his politeness.
‘Shush you! Something went wrong.’
‘Oh!’ he paused for the eternity of an awkward moment, ‘Can I do anything to help?
‘Help!? I don’t know, be a better blood offering, speak in the tongue of the heretic, faint. All of these are good options. I mean, dang it, I wait until the blood moon, I read the forgotten tome of dust, I did the knuckle thing and poof, nothing! This was supposed to be a visceral massacre of life, not a wet mess.’
‘Sorry, that’s my bloo-’
‘I said shush!’ Marla snatched up her knife and stormed into the adjoining lounge room furiously studying the summoning rituals again leaving Andrew alone in the kitchen.
Andrew the common, as his friends called him. had long been an unwilling participant in the trappings of life–that is until this morning, when Andrew became the unwilling participant in an Eldritch ceremony hoping to end all life within the universe and to bring that which lurks in pits of shadow into the prime material.
‘Mel-u-la-bilat, Me-lu-la, *sigh*, me-luth-la-bylat!’ Marla was loudly attempting to decipher the phonetics of her ritual while pacing around the dining table cluttering her lounge room. The large table was jammed awkwardly between her lounge and television, so that using either was partially obstructed by the other. The addition of another table, now currently occupied by Andrew in the very next room, did little to help the chaos of furniture that was Marla’s apartment.
‘Gee, lots of rain this week’ Andrew called to the other room, the need to engage in small talk was so ingrained into him that he wielded it as a defense mechanism. The coldness of the knife wielding stranger’s silent reply rebuked him like a head butt full of indignation. After a long pause, and taking cue from Sisyphus with his bolder, Andrew tried again. ‘So, who are you trying to call? Is that the right phrase? Call?’
There was a heavy tome like thump on the lounge room table followed by stomps of huffy frustration heading toward the kitchen; Andrew gulped into the stupidity of politeness.
‘I will stab you for non-sacrificial reasons if you don’t let me think for a second!’ Marla snapped as she returned to the kitchen jabbing the knife near enough to Andrew’s rib cage to refresh memories of its capability. A pause followed ‘Wait, you’re not actually interested in the summoning, are you?’
With the fear of a thousand cowards Andrew leaked an “Uh-huh” and then returned to panicked sweating.
‘Well, if you must know,’ Marla thrust the knife into the table, extracting a whimper, as she pulled up a chair and began to tell Andrew a story.
Long ago, when the soup of the universe was broiling in a pulp-ish ooze, the spaces between each atom were longer, darker; they had an elasticity. They pulled and retracted without whim, nor reason. These spaces were the whole; they were everything. Time did not pass, but it did move, and it moved inward, squishing, and contracting this space until everything burst. The atoms condensed becoming single atoms themselves. This happened again and again until they formed a daisy.
“A daisy!?”
Marla’s direct eye contact, coupled with a slow, purposeful, hand movement toward the kitchen knife allowed her to continue.
But the space between still existed and lost for purpose, hid in perfect shadow. An eternal entrapment, shadow grew parallel to the prime material, close to all but never physically touching what it once controlled. There is a membrane that now separates us from the dark.
‘I intend to leave the link severed. Have you ever wanted to leap off the cliff you watch the world on?’ Perhaps suffering from blood loss, or because of her impassioned speech, Andrew couldn’t shake the thought that, despite the clear and present madness in Marla’s eyes, she had a very kind face. Silence once again overtook the single bedroom flat. ‘How’s the…cut?’ Marla gestured to the wound on Andrew’s side with the confidence of a person who just started regretting her knife placement.
‘It’s fine. Not bother at all, really.’ A wheezing emanating from Andrew’s chest wound crumbled the foundation of his lie. After an attempt at crying, he had decided that passing out may be easier.
‘It looks like a smile. I’ll get you a towel. Um, maybe a few towels.’ As Marla ran to her linen cupboard, she glanced back at the man lying near death on her kitchen table and thought ‘I wonder if he likes me?’
-J.McCray
2019
Sunday Short Stories 