And the world goes quietly.

​

There are no sirens, no open wounds, no bright lights. Just a sudden absence and dusky purple. A breath through a punctured lung.

​

A neon sign flickers on, impossibly red through the haze. Open over the doorway of what, until just now, was a diner. Plastic red, sticky tiles, the now-decorative jukebox and the tinny speakers that did a piss-poor job of replacing it. A tipped-over mop bucket and the puddle next to it. The lights, fluorescent cold, come to life in canon.

​

Something with white eyes and white hair and shark’s teeth sits at a booth, hands under its thighs, pressing its bare feet to the floor and relishing in the sound, the feeling, of peeling flesh away from dirt. It smiles. It is unnerving to look at.

​

The Jeanne D’Arc of Derby is standing in the door, wearing a full suit of armour. She is not looking at the thing, how it delights in something tangible and unclean, but bearing witness to it.

​

It is also unnerving to bear witness to.

​

She walks towards it, the steel plates of her armour growing lighter and quieter, reverence to the unexplainable and this altar made of fake marble, condiment bottles and napkins. She kneels before it, bowing her head low, exposing the back of her neck, her fists clenched. There is no sword in her hands, no shield at her side, only her fear (shoulders)—her resentment (sternum)—her love unyielding (fingertips).

​

​

GET UP. THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO THAN KNEEL.

​

 

Its voice is not heard but felt, thrumming in her jugular vein.

​

​

She looks up in shock, directly into its white, empty eyes. “Like what?”

​

&​

 

Through a chain-link fence, a little girl with uneven pigtails is talking to a man with three days of drink on his skin. Behind her, a playground, full of all the other children playing. Behind him, a road. He’s not stupid, he’s crouched more or less inside a bush, covered by the dense green.

 

“Alright, Agent Fox, you got the goods?”

 

“I don’t wanna be Agent Fox,” she nearly whines (1), feeding tubes of glue through the gaps in the fence. “Why d’you get to be Agent Lion?”

 

“Because I’m older,” he says, pocketing the glue as soon as he can get a hold of it.

 

“Bullshit.”

 

Agent Lion blinks in surprise, trying very hard not to laugh. “Who taught you to say that?”

 

“You did.”

 

He laughs, surprising himself with how light it sounds.

 

“What’s your name?” she asks.

 

“We’ve been over this, Agent Fox. Codenames or they’ll bust our whole operation wide open.” He looks at her. She’s so small. Then, too fast, “Gabriel.”

 

Her eyes light up. “Like from the nat–natib–nativy–”

 

“Nativity?” He laughs dryly (2). “Sure, if you like.”

 

“I wanted to be Mary last year but I had to be a sheep instead. I looked stupid. Adam played Gabriel and he had a white dress and halo made of tinsel and—” her eyes narrow. “Where’s your halo?”

 

Before he can answer, she shrieks—a spider scurries up her pink shorts and she frantically brushes it away.

 

“Not a spider fan?” he asks sympathetically. He doesn’t like them much, either.

 

“Don’t like their little hands.” She kicks at the ground. “I hate it when people touch me.”

 

Through the booze, alarm bells. She’s just a kid, she doesn’t mean anything by it (3). Still, breathing comes harder. “Spiders aren’t people.”

 

She sighs. She sounds like a war widow. “I hate both. Do people touch you?”

 

He sees it in her eyes. He sees what no-one wanted to see in his. “Not any more,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Bite and scream. Make him bleed.”

 

She mouths make him bleed to herself, nodding. Then she frowns. “Will that work?’

 

He presses his lips together in a thin line for a moment, looking up into the sky to stop tears forming. A memory rings in his ears, cold flagstone and shame. He wishes he could let it go, but the past is not an animal. “I don’t know. Maybe God will save you.”

​

​

&​

​

A martyr is kidnapped. A hessian sack yanked over his head, his wrists cable-tied together, the messenger unceremoniously thrown into the back of a van. A gun is held to his head (4). He does not cry. He will not cry. The thin plastic gnaws at his wrists, the barrel of the gun bores into his temple, he feels every jolt of the van in his bones. He forces herself away; stained glass, high ceilings, rebirth—this is a test, bear it.

 

Between the van’s sudden standstill and the hands hauling him away, a heartbeat of peace. In places, he can see the strands that weave the sack together.

 

Dampened light knocks the air out his lungs, and the darkness fails to bring it back. Through the dragging toes of his shoes, he feels tarmac transfigure into plush carpet. Red comes to mind. His body is pushed into a chair, and the bag is lifted. He blinks in the sudden light, low and sultry as it is. A restaurant, Michelin star. The chair is elegant, silk-smooth mahogany and embossed cream upholstery. Draped over the table in front of him is a cloth so pure and clean just looking at it makes him feel less by comparison.

 

On it is a bucket of spiders. The bucket brims with them. A seething mass of grey-brown-black crawling bodies, wisps of web already clinging to erratically moving legs. It writhes. There is nowhere else to look. A disembodied voice:

 

“Eat.”

 

He holds up his bound hands.

 

“Eat.”

 

There is no part of him that isn’t consumed by love. He has the skin grafts in early stages of infection to prove it (5). Hands clasped together, he lowers his face into the bucket. He keeps his eyes open just long enough to meet the black eight of a wolf spider as it crawls up his cheek. Blind now, he bites down (6). His tongue counts six legs, feeling fuzz dampen against it. Teeth grind as he lifts his head back up, two spindly legs fitfully kicking against his chin.

 

It tickles.

 

Carefully, so, so carefully, a thumb brushes away three saint’s tears

​

and the blood that fills his mouth is blue.

​

​

&​

​

A girl walks into a lake and is coughed out on a shipyard.

​

A picket fence of picnic tables at the edge of the water, all packed with patchwork groups of people, smoking or pretending not to care about smoke. An angel is squeezed onto a bench, outsider-invisible. It finally looks like the girl wants it to—white dress, tinsel halo, so beautiful it hurts. There’s a can of Red Stripe on the table in front of it.

 

“You took your time,” the angel says.

 

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” the girl says.

 

“You’re telling me,” the angel says, smoothly freeing a cigarette from the clutches of the man sitting next to it and flicking it into the water behind them. It burns still, drifting away.

 

“I’ve been thinking,” she says as she slides onto the bench opposite. The strangers at the table move to make room without realising.

 

“Always dangerous,” it mutters as it takes a sip of Red Stripe. It fizzes out the back of its head and no-one notices.

 

She ignores it. “About what you told me.” She takes a deep breath, imagines cold water rushing over her head. “When we can’t find God, we invent our own.”

 

After a moment, the angel asks, “Is that really all you have to say?”

 

​

&​

​

A knight walks into a diner and orders a bucket of spiders. She tosses them into her mouth and swallows them whole, grimly determined. Bile rises in her throat, but she chokes it down (7). She can stop at any time, but she won’t. She has convinced herself suffering at her own hand makes it more real.

 

An egg sac bursts in her mouth and every nerve is flayed open. There are baby spiders burrowing into the holes in her teeth, squeezing out between her lips, coating her gums. She wants to scream and cry and smash her head against the table, to claw out handfuls of her flesh and burn them, do something bloody and messy and violent so the feeling takes physical form and she doesn’t have to feel it anymore—but she can’t. Won’t. This is a test, endure it. She stays living-statue still until all the baby spiders have crawled into her hair or suffocated in her throat.

 

A being with three faces (fox—human—lion) with gold gauntlets for hands appears, wearing a black apron and holding a little black notepad, black biro poised over the paper.

​

“What’re you supposed to be?” the knight asks. She knows she’s being rude, but thinks she’s earned the right. And besides, she has always hated it when the angels look wrong.

 

The fox laughs, loud and sharp, looking left (8).

 

“Who are you helping by doing this?” the human face says. It is achingly ugly.

 

She abandons any pretence. There’s no time. “But martyrs—”

 

“Oh, spare me any more fucking martyrs!” the angel says, its metal hands creaking as it snaps the notebook shut. “Suffering isn’t religion. Stop hiding behind God because you’re miserable. And you did this to yourself—this doesn’t count, this is your fault!”

 

“I just want—”

 

“To what? You just want to what? To feel something? So does everyone else. When the end comes you will have nothing to show for it but a sword you don’t know how to use and a heart that’s—”

 

“Derelict?”

 

The lion laughs, surprising itself. The angel says, “Your words, not mine.”

 

Silence winds its way through them, a river that dries in between breaths.

 

“You know, I’d nail you to the cross myself if I thought it would help.”

 

“There’s no way to be sure it wouldn’t.”

 

It shakes its head. “Find something else to love.”

​

​

&

​

A girl, thirteen, shaved head, rolls up her baggy pink trousers (9) and wades waist-deep into the nearest lake, trying to find God and mean it this time. There’s dirt under her fingernails and razor cuts on her scalp and she already knows this is how people get saved. The truth can only go so far. The rest has to hurt.

​

​

&

​

The world ends all in purple and Jeanne D’erby is drinking genuinely terrible black coffee through a straw, sitting opposite another angel who doesn’t act like she wants it to. Her eyes are glassy and unseeing.

​

“Will the blindness last forever?” She asks, the plastic straw melting in the cup. Her jugular live-wire hums and she says depends what you mean by forever as she feels the words reverberating up the back of her skull.

​

The angel laughs. She feels the sound settle heavy across her collarbones.

​

​

WAS IT WORTH IT?

​

​

She goes to say yes, but the word won’t leave her. This is what she wanted. The end that leaves only the most faithful. Just her and total freedom in suffering and confirmation that yes, yes, it was her all along, she has always been right to hurt like she has, it was all for a reason, a plan written out for her since the beginning, pigtails and teeth and ruined pink, gone in purifying flame, flesh made steel. She thought she would feel cleaner.

​

​

NO. I DIDN’T THINK IT WAS.

​

​

It’s the end of the world. And the world goes quietly.