It had been four years since the sky collapsed on the skeleton city in a shower of stars. People spoke a dead language from ruined tongues, remarking on the decrepit state of what had once been their lives. Ghosts of yesterday danced through the streets in a phantom ballet to a symphony of sighs and passers-by watched it with a morbid curiosity. This was the world, whether they wanted to accept it or not. I didn’t.

Four years was not a long time, but somehow people had already forgotten how it used to be. I hadn’t. I remembered a flourishing city and a blue sky stretched far and wide. I remembered fields of flowers and the heat of sunshine across my face. Now I spent my days staring at the sky, watching God, and wondering where he had gone. I thought he was hiding, but even priests thought he had died long ago. Or, at least, he had forgotten about the urban labyrinth of side streets and back alleyways.

I counted time by the spider webbed cracks in the sidewalk and decayed buildings I passed on my daily walk through the city. People were faceless now; wraiths that danced a macabre foxtrot through the streets and navigated around me without ever regarding my presence. I wasn’t like them. The radios sang static – white noise prophecies that couldn’t even be deciphered by the hierophants that lined the gutters in prayer to forgotten idols.

“Fuck…” I spoke in broken sentences, clipped and cut up, most of my words never made it passed the tip of my tongue. I sighed at the sight of St. Michael’s Catholic Church; people crowded into its hollowed halls in hopes of salvation. Wishful thinkers made my stomach turn; they spoke of a better world but took no actions to see it come into fruition.

The curb became my soapbox and I teetered onto my toes so I stood above the crowd of zombies that went through the motions without thinking twice. “This is not the way it should be!” I screamed a mourning hymn to the crowd who did little but glance in my direction. I waved my hands (scarred from times I should have died) up high in surrender. But my battle wasn’t finished so I shrieked a banshee’s lament to the crowd and lured them in close with a noose of words.

“We can make a change! We can make it better!”

They laughed and howled like wolves to moon goddess who lay in shattered pieces across a blanket of black; what had once been the sky. I cut them off in a magician’s slight of hand, but no rabbit was produced from a black hat, rather words of wishful and motivation to change. Some continued on their way but there were a few trapped in my widow’s web and stayed to listen.

“Lies!” One sang.

“This is a dead city!” Shouted another.

“Quiet, quiet,” I yelled and leapt from my curbside perch to integrate myself with the gathering crowd. I clasped hands to shoulders and whispered heresy into the ears of whoever was willing to listen. My lies were grandiose enough to be mistaken for truth and I, the deceiver, smiled. “I can fix things! I’ll make it better!” While I could indeed make it better the cost was their souls. As the crowd grew, my perverse promises spread like the plague through the graveyard city and people began to listen. Soon they had crowned me their king and I laughed with my court – a collection of the corrupt and wicked.

The people had written damnation across their faces by shaking my hand and elevating me into something ethereal. They regret their actions now; they had taken the easy route instead of the hard at the price of their own salvation. A computer chip in the palm wrote out a person’s identity and engraved with six, six, six to point out those who were aligned with me and mine; the devil’s hand held a royal court. I, the king, had a harlot queen who strode nude through the city and let everyone taint her skin with their touch. Our nights were spent drunk on sin and we laughed.

People had forgotten God and replaced him with a celebrity idol. They had hanged themselves while I watched with an executioner’s smile.

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