The Gods Have Fallen and the World Deteriorates
Shreeya Goyal
i. flowers scoured in fairy wings
You are desolate in the porcelain shop, crescent moons in the boardwalk of wooden floors; your mother advised you, “Don’t tell the girls in the porcelain shop that there is no love to exist beyond the crack of their skin.” It is the dusk of night; fingers wind around the clock of tomorrow, and there is no one else here, only the cashier in ceramic skin. In curlicue trails you trace the outline in China-made dolls; you detest porcelain faces, those with flowers to scour the fairy wings, a resplendent glory — or maybe that’s envy. You had forgotten how you abominate this summer as the moon fell to search for a kiss in its crescent light, and the heat barred your skin as citrus juice, sticky on your hands. The cashier seemed surprised when you ordered the China-made music box; it falls in the musk of sweat and blood. It was for your sister. Your sister is dead. To understand the death of your sister, you must first understand her living. She moved in white epiphany, the crevices of gods, and she lived as black, coiling rampage through her skin. The cashier said, “I’m a psychology student.”
You combed through your hair. “Don’t you get tired, listening to all those theories?”
“A windfall of possibilities– I enjoy being driven insane.”
The Puritans were the salvation of God, rotten-gold blood searing through their veins in their ornament screams; they were to rip themselves at the shrine and teach their children to smile through broken veins.
When you sat with the cashier, she told you about her immigration from Japan. You thought about the porcelain dolls; your momma bought all your toys in ceramic. The cashier told you, “They don’t like me here. They don’t like my voice.”
You thought her voice could build cathedrals with the finest gold.
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ii. the tire of washed out blood
She drags you out many nights later, where you kiss each other until she’s nostalgia between your teeth and she’s built a renaissance cathedral in the void of your mind. You sit on the porch after, naked under a single blanket, and she traces your belly in amber-dipped rosary. The night is stellar in a milked galaxy, and the moon glows where the archangels sit — they once bellowed from the molten pits of this land. You thought about the General Santa Anna — he rose in a swine of perish to say, “If I were God, I would wish to be more,” but the figment of gods don’t raise superiority. He rose in veins of virgin frost, a rebuked rebel sought to create casualty death of his kind, but death is not a home, it is a beckoning. She said, “Tell me a story.”
You told her of the merciless gods, in which they tore your skin apart at the tomb of an altar, and buried their hands deep in your flesh. They only sang songs of bird chirps, pulled your hair, and dressed you in resemblance to their white skin — honeycomb songs, they sang, in tires of washed-out blood. She laughed and told you, you should be a writer.
“Maybe. A writer sounds too beautiful for someone like me.” You drank lemonade, tinged in bohemian ordeal. “I want to live on the moon. There are no gods. We could rule the moon together.”
“I would go to the moon with you,” she said. “But I would miss the moonlight.”
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iii. the gods falling in golden-comb silk
You both lay in the grass, hands on legs, legs on thighs, limbs on limbs on limbs; she lay splayed in a tight, stretched dress. You only tried riveting your view elsewhere. She grabbed your hand with sticky skin; her sweat a sap to fill your pore — she was a grazed malice, an immaterial justification in what haunts you. The sun seamed itself to the sky in writhes of white meddling, hazes to our naked eye; we cannot trust this eye, you thought; it configures the placidity of love into the rage of desire. The grass tickled your neck, and her skin of porcelain broke, fine black cracks playing remedy for across pores; she kissed you with cool lips.
“Don’t look at the sun,” she said. “Don’t look at the gods.”
You loved the sunrise too fondly to fear the gods, mythical creatures of the highest egomania. She touched you with feathered hands, illusions wrapped with cathartic kisses of her butterfly lips, brazed against honeysuckle skin. And when you broke apart, there lay red distill, blood pouring through her cracks, smudged into the breaks of her porcelain skin. The sky broke in the same way, stars pigmented in hallucinations of the gods falling in golden-comb silk, superiority to break in their landing to Earth. Finally, you thought, the gods have fallen, and the world deteriorates.
“Oh, look.” Her porcelain cracks break her face in two. “There is no more. I am finally free.”
The End.
Shreeya is an Indian-American writer from California whose work has appeared in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Contests. She is pursuing Astrophysics, as well as writing, and is currently working on a novel.