Chrysalis

by Emmie Christie

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

The air stagnated in the streets. No, it rotted, like so many leaves in a compost pile. Siran grabbed her oxygen mask off her bedside table and clapped it over her mouth. She dragged in another breath, and her stomach unclenched in relief.

She dragged herself out of bed and outside. The stars had dimmed further.

People outside slumped, oxygen masks over their faces or dangling from their hands, watching the fading stars like an inverted fireworks show. Here in the last city left on Earth, not much remained to entertain, so why not appreciate what was left of the sky?

“There, Mommy,” one little girl said. “That’s the Big Dipper, right?”

The mother squinted and nodded, though the little girl had pointed to part of Cassiopeia.

Siran had studied astronomy in college and dreamed of joining NASA someday. Her whole life, she’d tried to inch closer to the stars, but the world liked playing cruel jokes. Of course she would live in the time period when the stars would disappear. She couldn’t have lived in the age of Plato, when maybe they didn’t have modern telescopes, but at least Plato still had had those pinpoints to gaze at.

NASA had studied the phenomenon in detail. They had no answers beyond that the space fog seemed to cover everything in the solar system and beyond it, too. In Earth’s atmosphere, it seemed to whittle away at their oxygen. Bit by bit.

Siran moved. She had to keep moving, or her feet kept her in one place. Traipsing over to the little girl and her mother, she pointed at the real Big Dipper, hiding behind the haze. “There. That’s what you’re looking for.”

The mother’s eyes had glazed over as so many did nowadays. Brain-sleeping. The little girl tipped her head up at Siran, her breathing labored. Her oxygen mask had slipped down her chin. “You’re… walking so fast.”

Her voice had the texture of a dried leaf pressed between the pages of a book. Thin. Siran shuddered. She didn’t know these people—she didn’t know anyone in the Last City. Everyone had come from different countries, from all over the world, as the officials had stopped trying to supply oxygen everywhere at once. Siran had lived here for a month now, holed up in one of the empty ranch houses. She used to travel with her friend Jari before Jari had curled up one morning in a haystack and not gotten up after that. 

Keep moving or get caught.

Siran reached out and slipped the girl’s mask up over her mouth and nose again.

She flitted through the quiet, drooping crowd. Most didn’t work anymore, not when everyone fought for their lives in their homes, and pulling oneself out of bed required oxygen masks. Nurses and NASA, they had jobs, though, and money had lost most of its meaning when they worked all day, every day, bleary-eyed and wilting along with everyone else. Why buy shelves when hammering in a nail stole all the energy someone had? Why sell food when everything rotted in the fields?

Siran put one foot in front of the other, not letting the thoughts catch her and hold her still. Moving was important. She knew it, like she’d known she wanted to travel the stars, in that part of her that warned her about oncoming traffic or avoiding an alley at night. The instinct drove her down the street, into the corner store that stocked food and essentials. She pushed through the doors, though they squealed with rust, and scanned the aisles for coffee and energy drinks.

Tired. She was so tired.

She slept for no more than three hours at a time. Reports had filtered through the scattered grapevines of some people not moving at all. Just immobile, like the lack of starlight had once powered kinetic motion, and without it… well. She trudged down the aisle and snagged a case of espresso.

The air tasted sweeter in here. An old cardboard container full of watermelons buzzed nearby; rotting, filling the store with the smell of decaying natural sugars. Siran gagged but made sure to top up her oxygen at the pump first. The pumps used to have people lining up for them, but this one had patches of rust. She hurried out, her hand over her mouth.

A few people near the store tilted their heads at her rush. She ignored them and slowed again, carrying the bottled energy back to her house. She lived in the night hours, now, when the air had cooled a little, and the night breeze swayed the tree branches like a tearful caress. She popped one espresso can open and downed it, wiping her mouth.

Right. She was ready.

She ran every day, trying to keep her lungs in shape. She scurried off down the road on her route. One mile today. She could do a mile. She used to run seven a day.

The little girl’s words, though, echoed in her mind. “You’re… walking so fast.”

No other person had visited the store the last few times she’d gone in. No one else jogged through the streets like she did, or even walked. They shuffled back and forth in their houses, the shadows moving on their walls as she passed. Weren’t they afraid? Didn’t they feel it, that stillness tugging at their heels, that creeping over their mind where they couldn’t remember their mother’s name? 

It didn’t matter. What did matter was that she run.

The next evening, Siran woke up, and part of her finger had stuck to her sheets.

With a shriek, she jumped out of bed, yanking her finger away. It pulled off like an old sticker on a glass. Parts of her skin stayed.

She stood there, shuddering, her stomach roiling, every part of her sweating like crazy. She stumbled out her front door and threw it open with a hazy anger.

All over the street, the crowd from last night had stayed put. Some of them remained upright, but most had folded over at the waist, arms hanging loose at their sides.

Their feet had melted into puddles on the ground, without structure or detail.

Siran stayed there for a moment.

Move.

With a jolt, she stepped forward. One step in front of the other. The mother and her daughter had stayed, holding hands. Their hands had fused into one mass of dripping skin.

Siran bent and dry heaved. Nothing came up except a little bile that soured the corners of her mouth.

She couldn’t—she couldn’t do this anymore!

She ran.

All over, peoples’ feet had melted into the ground. Hundreds. None of them seemed awake. 

“Hello!” she shouted into the crowded, frozen street.

One person, a young man with large muscles, turned his head. His feet had liquefied like everyone else’s, but his skin glistened with sweat like hers. She rushed over to him.

“Run,” he said.

Her feet had stuck to the ground. She ripped them away, the bottoms of her heels red and bleeding, and she ran, and she ran. She dragged her oxygen tank from her house to fill it up, but the dispenser had nothing left. No one had refilled it. She was the last of the Last City. Everywhere else, the fog, the viscosity of the air, had stopped people in their homes like bugs caught in amber.

She did not dare to glance up at the dimming stars. They drove her mad. They had driven the world mad. The universe had thickened into a soup, and she could do nothing to stop it!

She ran back to her house to drink more coffee. She had to stay awake, she had to!

Days later, or more than that, she stuck to her front porch, her whole foot liquefied all at once, spreading out and dripping between the wooden planks. She screamed, but the lack of oxygen had transformed her lungs into twisted things, and what came out was raw and wet and saturated with decay. She could not run. She had been caught; she had failed!

And yet, she could breathe better somehow. She could expand her twisted lungs. She could—reach—

Sometime later, a day, a month, she woke up as her entire house. No, she had blended with it, into its structure, the parts of her that used to be her, now it as well. She ruminated on her lungs, now with composites of wood and concrete.

Later, not much time later, she annexed the surrounding alley, and the street and the corner store. The espresso caffeine made her new body smile, reminding her of what she used to be, and the nostalgia of individuality. She’d run so long. And yet, she still moved. Now she moved even faster than before. She could feel it, how far she had gone down the street. So fast.

The last. The last. I am the last. She’d held onto her mind, and herself, to the very end. What was her friend’s name again? The one who had died sleeping in the haystack? It had slipped right through her mind.

She still had her own name. Siran. Yet she’d grown so much more.

She combined with the mother and the daughter in front of her house, first, to honor their connection to her, one of the last to speak out loud.

She incorporated the city next, all along its base and deep under the sewers, and then from there, she grew up, and up, and up into the sky! Oh! What a glorious thing! She melded with it all, up into the heavens!

When she reached the coolness of space, though, she pulled back in shock. It called back to her individuality. She’d dreamed once of the stars, of seeing them, of traveling them.

Well, now she could. She stretched towards those pinpoints of light!

The fog surrounded her and the whole of the stars like a thick blanket, warm and comforting. She could feel that, now. Instead of cutting off her oxygen as it used to, she knew it protected her from something On The Outside. It had layered around the universe and kept it safe. Kept her safe.

She was changing. The more she touched, the more she transformed. Her twisted lungs grew into membranous wings. She reached out antennae and touched Mars, and Jupiter, and then further to the Big Dipper. Not so far away. She waved to Cassiopeia, then saw through her eyes, became her eyes. Sirius. Arcturus. She extended further into another galaxy, and the next, and she became them, and they her. She gathered the unnamed planets and stars to herself with care and affection, for even she did not remember her name any longer. So many names of stars simmered inside her, she could not keep them straight.

Her antennae brushed against something then. The fog. The covering. A dried-up leaf big enough to cover the universe, cover her. She poked at it. Prodded. This strange thing had kept her folded up like flower petals in the night, packed in, and now she wanted to stretch and move. She pushed through and burst out into a brightness.

The stars! Oh, the stars! She understood now!

She stretched her wings. Unfolded them, wet, and wrinkled, out into the light. She fluttered up out of the fog, her chrysalis, and breathed in the spring air of that new place. The space fog had protected her, for a time, while she transformed. The light above sang of oxygen and spring, arrayed in their full glory and illumination, a consistent intensity of star-sky.

She was no longer a universe, but what a universe changed into. She had no name. It was a blank. It did not matter.

All around, other winged creatures fluttered, whole flocks of evolved universes.

Time to move. Blank smiled. 

EXHIBIT FOUR: Return to “Dental Hygiene”

Proceed to the final Gallery Four: Controllers and final Exhibit Four attraction, “When I Come Back”