‘That’ll be 50 cents love.’
‘Thanks Hazel’ said Marla as she took the carton of milk off the counter and dropped some change into a salvation army donation box. Nodding goodbye in her turn to leave the mopy 27 year old immediately became entangled in the bakery’s red and green fly curtain and fell outside with a graceless thwump. Panicked and then relieved to have not landed on a full carton of milk, Marla caught her breath and looked up to the afternoon sun of another Saturday, it was quite a nice day, pleasant even.
Despite her plans to destroy reality, Marla was always conscious about the importance of calcium. Strong bones make a healthy skeleton and if she ever was lucky enough to join the skeletal army of Narughul Ra there was no way that she wanted to look unkempt. Thinking on this for a moment, she suddenly became all too aware of her teeth and wondered when she had brushed them last. ‘Andrew? Have you ever found a tooth in an apple? Like, not one of your own?’ Marla had stopped and was talking to the copper penny that contained the soul of her reluctant familiar and one time blood sacrifice.
‘Can’t say I have…. Wait what?’ The penny, named Andrew, fretted over the question with the panic of a coin who was human shaped two days earlier.
‘Oh never mind,’ Marla sighed, changing the subject as she opened up her carton of milk, ‘Ever since I messed up the sundering ritual I’ve been struggling to feel normal.’
‘Hey, you did a great job. I mean, I never expected to be imprisoned within a coin via demonic sacrifice, but for a first attempt at slashy stabby cult magic I’d say you did pretty neat.’
With Andrew’s encouragement mildly amplifying the feelings of failure, Marla rubbed her face in exasperation; looking down to her hands, still caked in the dirt and dried blood of digging her first grave, she realised her mistake and sighed. ‘Ugh, blood and crumpets! Why am I so dumb!?’
Andrew, in this moment, remained tactifuly silent.
‘Ah darn it all! I had an idea you know, back at the library. But I’m not sure if it’ll work and knowing me it’ll probably just be a bad idea anyway.’
Andrew paused, desperately wanting to cheer Marla up somehow, ‘Well, sometimes the worst ideas have the best chance of destroying something…. Um, what’s your plan?’
Furrowing her brow Marla relented a smile, ‘Well, we go home, shower, transpose you into a reliquary of darkness and then we try cutting the seam that holds the sky to the horizon!’ Becoming a vaguely out of breath and catching herself almost mid-skip, Marla slowed back to a walking pace that more suited her poor cardio and kept heading home, the sky dimming as her mood improved.
Returning to her apartment, and placing the empty carton of milk into the recycling, Marla sat by her reading table (Apartment table count: 5) and leafed through an open grimoire. ‘So, a dagger of undoing requires three things for it to work properly; The blood of a dragon; fifty years spent forging in a furnace of Saulu Marter; and lastly, the smith has to die with the final strike of his hammer.’ Marla reread the steps for a moment while spinning an increasingly dizzy coin on the table, ‘Egh, that’s too much effort for a Weekend… Let’s cheat a bit and try the hobbyist version’. Grabbing a swiss army knife from her bits and bobs draw, she placed both it and Andrew into the microwave, set a timer for 50 minutes, then hid behind the couch…
…as the haze began to clear, a knife spoke from the remains of a microwave,
‘How do I look?’
‘Sharp Andrew, you look real sharp’ coughed a reply from underneath the overturned couch.
Darkness began to build on the horizon and somewhere nearby a smoke alarm went off..
…‘Is this really a good idea Marla?’
‘Sure why not!? Every idea has the potential to be amazing under the delusion of a narrow hindsight.’ a distracted Marla said as she held the Swiss army knife of undoing threateningly over her smartphone. ‘Didn’t you say something like that before? Anyway, hope this doesn’t void my warranty’
Andrew, caught in this moment of great drama, hoped to say something poignant, but only managed to say, ‘What?’
Stabbing downward with a satisfying thunk, the knife cut easily through the phone and then continued into abstract. With unwavering efficiency the blade sliced through the very heart of the internet itself; every piece of recorded history, the collected entirety of humanity’s labours, destroyed with a single cut, one strike methodical enough to kill the concept of an idea itself.
And so, the final moments of the spinning earth ended not with a bang, pop or a voided warranty, but they were met with a rapid untangling of every connected atom within existence. Cell upon cell collapsing inward and rolling away as if trillions of marbles had fallen from a bucket. Darkness intertwined with light making two distinct poles unified. Every concept undone.
Within the shadows a daisy grew.
‘…
‘Oh hello!’
Jacob McCray
-2019
Sunday Short Stories 