“Apocaloid” by Steven Cline

THE VOICE FROM NOWHERE

I am a metallic cloud. Silver, solid,  frozen. 

(pause)

I have lived for a thousand years. And I am watching the day retreat from itself. The sky is grey ÷ cold.

(pause) 

I watch the little bodies falling. Encased in raincells. They collect on the ground. Among the dead, dry grass. A pile of broken gifts. Or offerings.

(pause) 

Catastrophe is a word with soft skin. A lavender hint, a promise. Of lost opulence.

I. THE MAN IN THE STREET

I wake near the tall, ornate doors of the bombed-out library. The morning light is gentle, a whisper of warmth across an ocean of endless winter. I look down at my leg, brushing back the accumulated snow. My toes are hard, black, and shiny. It seems the exoskeleton has begun to spread. It seems I’m still becoming millipede.

I stick my tongue out, and catch the rotten snowflakes. My tongue is loose not taut, and covered in long, coarse hairs. Mother used to think I was cute, when I did this. There’s a picture of me on my seventh birthday, standing in the snow in some red puffy jacket. Tongue out to greet the sky, hungry to greet the future.

Things are a little different now. Mother is dead. Dad is a statue at the bottom of the sea. Part of an artificial reef near Haiti, one of the first wave volunteers. He always liked those colorful, silly fish. I guess when the metal cloud appeared above us, the world turned just a little bit strange.

Our lives are governed by its cycles now. Transmutation cycles. This season is  an insectoid one, and I guess our enviable city got assigned primarily Subphylum Myriapoda. Once it runs its course, they’ll be some other in rotation.

I’m feeling hungry, so I skitter towards the waterfront. Huh. I guess the change in me is quickening. We don’t have any mirrors here. They all shattered. SubSpatial displacement, or whatever. So I can’t see exactly what I’ve become. I don’t suppose the details matter all that much.

I find a basket of fish for sale in the market. At Steve’s stall. You know, the stinking one. He’s got a cockroach face, but a kind heart. His beady little eyes register something bittersweet, as I hand him the silver coin. Irritating. Don’t patronize me, Steve. I pull my basket of tropical fish to a dark alleyway, hoping to gain a little privacy. It’s not a pretty thing, an insect’s eating habits. 

The opened flesh glimmers and shines. A marvelous treasure, a vivid jewel. Falling snowflakes touch the rainbowed, bloody skin, and disappear. Communicating vessels, beautiful lost lovers. This new world has its charms.

I devour and feel satiated. Happy. Rare treat. 

I pause, look down.

At the bottom of the basket, I see a familiar face. Dad’s face. He’s a yellow fish with blue stripes now, though his face is still fully human. His eyes are open, vibrating back and forth rapidly. They seem to register no reality. 

“Dad?” I whisper.

The vibrating eye stops, locked dead center on my black forehead.

The eye expands, enlarges. Wraps itself around the whole body of the fish, sucks it inside. Becomes one dead, unblinking eye. And I can no longer meet its sharp gaze.

One translucent, shameless tear floats up from the eye towards the metallic cloud above, and becomes its newest moon. 

Dad dissolves. Yet I remain. 

Living in an infinite, perpetual apocalypse. 

Just a millipede.

II. THE CALL

I am a black rotary phone waiting in the night. I wait for calls.

The beginning of a new transmutation cycle came and went. And we all became the animate-inanimate. Phones, pinball machines, bicycles. For most in these forms, mobility is diminished. For me? It’s an impossibility. So, I wait. On a freezing street, half covered in snow. Facing cracking black asphalt and what’s left of a Buick.

The first moon is ripe tonight. A few wispy clouds swim nearby, but retreat from her, as though frightened, letting her radiate fully, letting her blossom and beckon. She completely dwarfs the second, pathetic Dad-Moon floating lower in the atmosphere. And I can almost feel myself drawn up to her. I can almost feel the decay of the Earth’s gravity. A celestial Venus flytrap…

My body rings, distancing me from my thoughts. I pick myself up.

“Hello?”

“The grave is full.”

“What’s that?”

“I told you. The grave is full. So don’t come looking to buy a dog coffin.”

“I don’t need one. I don’t have a dog.”

“Of course you don’t. He’s dead.”

“No, I mean…”

Click. End of call. 

They are always like this. Disconnected, disjointed. I can never grasp anything real, it feels like I’m witnessing the fragments of someone else’s dream. Contextless information, uploaded to my shiny plastic head by an irrational machine. Nothing but wrong numbers, all day. All night. For weeks.

A blue car drives timidly down my dimly lit street, tires rolling slowly over the rubble and the trash. There is no driver, of course. I recognize the car almost immediately, even without his cockroach face. It’s Steve, the fishmonger. That fucking asshole. I can smell him from fifty feet away. It’s an obscenely fishy smell, naturally. He’s transporting some not-so-fresh catch in his back seat, and probably in his slimy trunk, too. Crabs, marlins, guppies.

He reaches me, and stops. Honks a few times in casual conversation. I can’t understand a word. He seems disappointed by my silence, and a little hurt. Whatever, it’s not my problem. I continue giving him the cold shoulder, so eventually he rolls away. The rancid smell in the air lingers for at least half an hour.

It must be three in the morning now. Around this time, I always tend to get a little emotional. I won’t bore you with the details. Or maybe I will.

It’s something about the silence, I think. It sinks inside, filling the empty spaces in me. Making the empty spaces yelp in pain. I don’t know how long I can keep going on like this. When you’re nothing but a wrong-number receiver, hope becomes a senseless joke. Yet when I’m not ringing, I feel an even deeper hollowness. I am an object. An object needs to fulfill its function. Why am I not in use? Why? I want to receive something, anything. The voice of a god or a devil. I just need to be filled. Filled. If only I would ring. If only a call would come…to fill me with that golden light, that eternal weightless promise. If only I could…

Ring, ring.

I pick myself up again. 

“Little bro?”

It’s my big brother on the phone. What terrible odds tonight. Finally get a real call, and then it’s him. Can’t stand the guy. He’s been hovering around ever since the weird thing with Dad happened a few weeks ago. Trying to be supportive, or something. But I don’t need a shoulder to cry on, big bro. I don’t need anything. Especially not from you.

“Yeah, what”

“The metallic cloud is spinning, did you notice?”

“Nope. So?”

“It’s just like Mother said.”

“I don’t remember.”

“When the metal spins, its gate will open. That’s what she said. Right before she disappeared.”

“Died, you mean.”

“Disappeared. Anyway. It’s spinning. And its ladder of light is descending. And the unseen shall become the seen and the golden paradise shall be split in two-thirds by the winding of the–”

I hang up. Another stupid infection. Prophetics infanticidus. When he gets like this, it’s a dirty, constant stream: vague unrealities splattering across the wall, one after another, without reason. And I’m not in the mood to calm him down today. Hell, I can’t very well give him an injection over a phone line.

Anyway – enough of this failure of a day. I unhook my power cord, and fall into a cold and dreamless sleep.

III. THE OPENING

It pains me to say it, but big bro is right. About that golden ladder. It isn’t happening on that night; it’s happening a few weeks later. But still. We’re all halfway into a new avian cycle, and most of us have wings. Mine are black, soft, and beautiful, a real step up from that black telephone. I think I’m headed toward becoming a starling, and I can go pretty much anywhere I like. I try my new wings out in the sky above the city like a wannabe Icarus, and hear a painful, ugly scraping sound. And then suddenly – there it is. A ladder unspooling from the cloud, and a wide-open door.

 And the sky turns from grey to darkest black then. And we gasp. All of us, in this old dead city. One big, magnificent, collective gasp.

I fly around the ladder, as do many others. It is bejeweled, smooth, elegant. An expensive antique. No one climbs it, of course — we all have wings. Awkward timing on the cloud’s part. Perhaps he’s a bit deranged. No, instead we fly right into it, passing its frosted, gaping mouth and heading straight toward a darkening stomach…

We pass the hallways of teeth, and the cosmic bone factory.

We descend the tunnels of skin, and catch a glimpse of the village of ghosts.

So many forks, so many competing elevators. 

One by one, we split up, get lost, divide.

An invading army, become confused. A failing viral horde.

The twists and turns seem endless. Left, right, up, down. Repeat.

And time feels very strange. Unblinking, bizarre. Without consistency.

Eventually, I find a red wooden door. White light is leaking past its edges. It seems to want – no, to beg to be opened. And to be opened by me, specifically. So I open it.

Inside is a room with several pillars. An alabaster prison. Wide, vacant, serene.

Inside is my mother. And some others, too. A thousand or so others. 

Not dead after all? But how – why?

“Because we are unchangeables, sweetie. The stubborn ones.”

I don’t get it. And I tell her so.

“What I mean is, we are resistant to all change. To the metallic cloud and its influence.  That’s why he keeps us here. His little embarrassments. His bad children, his black sheep…”

 But still, why?

 “We are blocked. There is a fish bone in our gullet. It stops the pollen from getting in. It stops the seed. Metaphorically, of course.”

 “Of course.”

 “And so he hides us. We’ve warped his heavenly plan. Stuck it in a rut. But he’s fed up with us now – I think it’s over.”

I can only tweet and twitter in reply. My avian transformation has finally finished, so my mouth is all beak. Mom frowns.

 “So shall I ride your back, honey? Out of here?”

 I tweet and I twitter.

 “Okay. Then I’ll ride on your back.”

Mom sits on me. No small feat, to keep my back up. To not collapse under her impressive weight. But stand I do. And then I flap. And then I fly.

We make it out of there easily enough. Because as soon as we are halfway out the door the metallic cloud’s skin cracks, shatters, falls. And crushes what’s left of our dying city down below. 

As I lie in the freezing snow among the rubble, with my wingbone slightly broken and Mom inert on top of me, a single peculiar thought comes to my mind:

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