The Burning World

The apocalypse didn't happen overnight. The world didn't end in a satisfying climax of explosive special effects. It was slow. It was boring. It was one little thing at a time. One moral compromise, one abandoned ideal, one more justified injustice. No dramatic wave of destruction sweeping across the world, just scattered spots of rot forming throughout the decades, seemingly isolated incidents until the moment they all merged.

Studies have shown that swearing has an anesthetic effect. Swearing eases pain.

Mozart,” Julie says in a bitter chuckle, staring at the speaker. “It’s supposed to be the pinnacle of art, right? This transcendent human achievement? And we use it for background noise in bathrooms. We literally shit on it.

I don't have to be a monster to hurt people. I can do it gently, with a single careless breath.

I want a god to curse. I'll take any of them, all of them; I'll scream and blaspheme till lightning shuts me up.

My response must be delicate but words are crude tools, prone to breaking what they're meant to repair. So I keep my mouth shut.

Our greatest sin is believing that we matter.

The Dead are a larger army than any ever assembled, and they follow no leader, fear no threat, and accept no bribe or compromise. The Dead are the silent majority, and should they ever decide to say something, it will be the new law of the land.

The magic that confounds them is humanity. The naturally occurring, slow acting, unpredictably potent product of conscious minds connecting. These madmen want to synthesise love. They want to manufacture it, weaponise it, and use it to control people. It’s such a ludicrous scheme it would be funny if they weren’t trampling the world in pursuit of it.

I hear someone calling my name—the one that I’ve earned and lived in and cared for, not the one pinned to me at birth and stained beyond recognition.

I wake up next to a woman. I'm not sure which one. My eyes burn and my head throbs; even the pricey stuff does it. No matter how much you pay for the drink, you pay again in the morning.

It feels like days since we've made eye contact. We avoid it like we expect to be injured. When did we learn to fear each other? To flinch away from what we imagine the other is thinking, the cruelties we've written and placed in each other's mouths?

One of my father's lessons that stuck: lying to someone gives them power. Makes them the judge and you the defendant. Tell the truth and deal with the results. Lying's for pussies.

He didn't come to make friends. He's got fire in his eyes and a sword in his mouth and he came to cut the world in half.

My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don’t remember mixed genes with a woman I can’t recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died. This is the arc of the average life—unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable—and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity.

WE WAIT in the rivers and the woods, in the sky and the cities and the sun, but we do not wait patiently. We have been patient too long. We have been told again and again that we can’t win, that the best we can hope for is balance, but we will no longer accept this. We feel a new future building beneath us, the magma of possibility pressing against the earth. We are becoming a mountain. We will erupt.

The strangest thing about her is her eyes. Though the rest of her body is putrid, her eyes are incongruously whole. They stare at the ceiling with a fierce intensity, as if somewhere inside her she is lifting impossible weights. People and places and a lifetime of memories. A thousand tons of raw human soul hauled up from the depths.

My brain hasn't yet remembered that my body is valuable.

It feels good to hate my life. It feels safe. If death is what I want, then nothing can ever hurt me.

He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Perhaps I died years ago, and Hell is a flooded planet of starving children and walking corpses and endless, senseless war.

Everything on earth has meant something to someone, and there has never been a person whom no one ever loved.

My mind is full of hornets.

hierarchies are lies. Because no one needs the alpha. He gets to the top by puffing and bluffing until we all believe he belongs there. When your power is built on ignorance, you don’t want people talking to each other.

Julie swears better than anyone I've known. She can draw from a vast vocabulary of filth and weave complex structures of inventive invective, or she can say what she needs to say using only variations of "fuck." She is a poet of profanity, and I suppress an instinct to applaud as she stomps around the room, squeezing her hand and spewing colourful couplets.

The Living do everything so vibrantly, the Dead think. Their blood sprays like party champagne, they hoot and howl like a gospel choir. Even in their agony, they are enviable.

Whatever we say will be the truth, because we’ll be the only voice.” I

The mantle flows beneath their feet like the nudge of a warm hand, and one by one, they begin to wander west.

The earth likes change. It grows bored with balance; rest makes it restless. The moment its inhabitants think they know the rules, it shakes the board clear and moves on to the next game.

but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my short residency here it’s that nothing ever happens when you’re ready for it. You tell life, “On the count of three!” and it goes on two.