A Purple Snake Who Fell To Bits

By: Jordan Seifert

Alice Moray held her hand out in front of her and peered through her three gangly fingers to sneak a glance at the waning curve of a sun. At the moment that night had stretched into dawn exactly one year prior, the sun had fallen ill. As galaxies clasped together like broken hands--Like Alice’s broken hands--The world sunk and the sun turned a hot purple. Nearby clusters of dust and debris rivalling our solar system in size blazed past us as the universe folded together. Our sun had nowhere to go, and so, it became a snake and began its long escape, slithering away. It stretched out in a massive S shape, a hot purple which scraped the blue from out of the sky and turned it a massive silver-cyan. And as the world looked up and saw all the rest of the universe passing by like a bus or a street car, uncaring, never watching, life fell to dust. Billions burned or starved or simply went mad, and the S in the sky drove the world to horrible things, and people turned from people and became creatures of a different magnitude. And when Alice Moray had watched all her classmates burn to charred shells, and her parents pull out their own eyes with fiery hot pokers, she realized all at once that at age eight, she was alone. The only time another person had come since then was when an older man had pinned her down and slapped her across the face, splitting her cheek and leaving an everlasting, twisting scar. He withdrew a knife from his old, worn jeans and cut off each of her pinkies, then stuffed them in his mouth and screamed. She watched in agony, fresh tears streaming down her child’s eyes, as he came to an intersection in the street. It split apart and off he went, sailing into the blazing core of the Earth.

Alice Moray, who no longer needed a name, was the last human being alive. There were things, she thought, but she was the last real person. The last vehicle on the road; the last of God’s creatures. She passed by a burning building where people had turned their eyes to stony brick and laid a foundation for a new life, but now it burned away. The era of blue, where water had trickled down, was over. Alice walked. Her features were striking, even for a child of her age. Cold blue irises faded into the milky white portions of her eyes. Her shaped eyebrows ushered her small, red nose, which sat up over puckered lips that had purpled after The Age Of Death, as it had been called. Her skin was a ghostly white, save the black rings around her eyes. The rings which were actually honest to God black, and not just a brimming grey. Her hair had turned white in a single moment, like a crack of thunder that blasted down each frayed strand. She had seen a man decapitate himself in one fell swoop, and out from his throat poured the edges of a cardboard box. They assembled themselves, and she read on the side, with an arrow pointing: This way up. The writing was upside down. The man stumbled frantically through the streets, and before long his feet had turned to chalk, and he drew death’s call in playground ink across the pavement. This image, so shocking it burned itself to her eyes, was faintly visible within her pupil. But there was no one to look, and all the mirrors were gone. There was nothing to indicate they were ever even there. Alice’s silver-white skin extended under her tattered clothes, a pink hooded sweatshirt that bore the marks of clawed animals which had attacked her, afraid for their lives. Some of them were headless, or limbless, and yet moved with a dead grace. Cities were turned to graveyards, and graveyards became like forests, where millions of stones stood. Alice had thought they were beautiful, but that beauty became far too over powering and stagnating as time wore on. Her ugly, faded jeans hid the men’s boots she had found. She clunked around, each step like walking on the moon, which no longer existed, her feet overly heavy. If an eight year old girl was already poorly balanced, the boots certainly didn’t help.

Alice came to a forest. An honest to God forest. Where trees stood dead, but still stood. Their branches hung low like thick vines, and Alice had thought that maybe she’d come to a jungle. She didn’t realize that the branches had melted to the strange shape, and it had once been a forest entirely of cherry wood. The ground underneath her feet was thick, endless ash. She waded through it, waist deep. the city completely devoid of any life, she had no choice but to trek into the woods. Alice wondered if there was any food left. She wondered if she’d find a monkey swinging from a branch, and she wondered if she’d take a knife and kill it. Before The Age Of Death had begun, Alice had read about monkeys in picture books and in a strange type of contact that glued information directly to her eyes. Even now this information stuck with her, and she went over the various species and behaviours of monkeys she had heard about. Her favourite was the Courtyard Monkey, which existed solely on certain brands of medicine. It had evolved that way, and now, unless it was kept on a constant diet of medicines which were belched up from the pill factories beneath the Earth, it would shrivel and die. And, Alice figured, they all probably had. But still she kept a shard of glass in her pocket. It was the only thing she’d found capable of slitting a creature’s throat, and she had done so on more than one occasion. A pig, a dog, a horse, and a classmate from her school who begged her for mercy as her hair fell from her melted skull and her brain stuck out like filthy, pink spikes. She remembered the blood clots which had formed in her classmates eyes. She remembered.

In the center of the woods, in a circle of broken land, where the ash receded and crystal grass stood, Alice found a lamp post. Like you’d find on a street. Like the light that beamed through your window and cast dark shadows, but at the same time was your only respite from pure darkness. That infinitely cast darkness which no longer existed, the sky above the Earth now a constantly lit mass of shredded paper, fluttering about like a neon coloured breeze. Alice looked up the pole and felt her heart drop. At the tip top of the steel protrusion, the shape of a man had been weaved to the steel with sharp, curved sticks and bloody nails. His arms and legs, much longer than the limbs of a normal man, hung down lifelessly, rings of thorny branches connecting them together, extending out the tips of the fingers and toes and connecting in a scribbled cluster beneath him. He had no human head to speak of, and instead, the steely grey post continued out his neck, riveted in flesh, where a mouth sat on the tip with the great big light inside of it. Alice stood in awe. She had seen people turned to all sorts of things. People who had turned themselves into vehicles or melded their beings with animals, or became dust that simply existed, floating in the wind. Alice, eight years old, had seen the most grotesque things that ever existed, but she had never seen this. She let out a gasp, and for the first time in two months, somebody had heard her. The twisted neck of the light peered down at her, its limbs shaking and shivering in an epileptic fit. Alice noticed that computer parts, or something like them, stuck out from the small of the man’s back and extended into the sky, so far she could no longer see. They swayed back and forth, where their thin endings were no doubt holed up somewhere in the far reaches of space. Long, stretched out, computer parts. Alice’s stomach dropped into her pelvis, and she turned to run.

“Don’t leave,” the quivering body spoke. It didn’t speak in a voice. It spoke in that unbelievably human tone. It spoke in that body language that all humans knew from birth. That innate feeling within us.

Alice had nothing to lose, and so, not courage, but sheer desperation took hold, and she resisted the urge to run. Alice spoke up to the light. “Why not?”

“I’m lonely,” said the light, its broken arms turning to press against its chest. The figure seemed neither masculine nor feminine, but despite its horrid features, it was beyond human. The creature flicked its wrist, whispering something horrible, but its body language was still friendly. It hissed and dripped and clung to life with what it had.

“I’m lonely too,” said Alice. The softness in her eyes faded, giving way to a burgeoning sadness. She remembered her parents, their violent deaths, the following months.

“I am lonely,” said the light, “Because I can see the world.”

“Well,” replied Alice. “I’m lonely because I can’t. Because no matter how far I go, there’s nothing but sadness for me to see.” It was an immense response. One the light pondered over.

Finally it responded. “There is nothing to see here if you are a good person.”

“I hope I’m a good person,” said Alice, biting her lip. It hurt. That sharp, stiff pain that had fallen over her entire body like a coat she couldn‘t remove. Like the old rain slickers her mother used to force her to wear. The ones that would make her all sweaty.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Alice,” said the light. It writhed, the tips of its fingers opening like tiny mouths to let out more brambles.

“Why?” said Alice.

“Because you’re the only person left. I see you every day, and I see you every day’s night,” the street light announced, its quiet whispers hushed to silence by the look in Alice’s eyes.

“Really? In the entire world?!” cried Alice. She looked defeated, and for a moment she wanted to fall into the crystal glass, but she might’ve torn her legs right off, and although it was hard, she resisted.

“In the entire world, Alice. But there’s something I want you to do,” said the lamp post, more serious now.

“What’s that?” said Alice.

“I want you to be brave.” The lamp post shook and shivered, spun back and forth bending at its base. Alice could hear something scratching inside. Something horrible. Something that didn’t bear thinking about. Finally, the lamp flickered on, and then dripped a cold goop onto the crystal lawn. It shone brightly, the prism of colours bursting outwards and through the broken shards of grass. It was beautiful. It was like a light show, beams of colour arcing into the sky and all around. Alice smiled a wild smile, her still white grin, one tooth missing, open to the light. She looked into the rainbow vomit and saw something strange. It looked as if she were staring through a window into a strange place. Alice stared up into the purple sky and then looked down. The two places were nothing alike. And in that time before the creature responded, Alice had exactly enough time to count to eight.

“Human creation, mother of invention,” the lamp post said, one of its arms breaking off at the bone. “I’ll be gone soon, and so will you. Please Alice, please dip your toe into that puddle.”

“Do I have a choice?” asked Alice.

“Of course you do, and I can’t make it for you. But this is a choice I urge you not to think over.” Clouds of stone showered overhead littering the cyan skies. She saw entire galaxies like saucers and spinning clumps of busted limb, just like on the lamp, raw in the air. The air which was so stuffy and hard to breathe that Alice breathed massive gusts wherever she went, allowing unfiltered dust and blood into her lungs. She saw the S shaped sun begin to slither violently, shaking the rim of the sky. She saw the light disappear, but the sky grow brighter. She saw stones crashing into the fields of murder. She saw the world come to a close. So Alice stuck a toe into the neon vomit, and then she was gone.

The girl, fresh and young, found herself in a green field where the grass was fresh and trimmed, and gigantic autumn leaves stuck up from the ground like trees that swung in the cool zephyr. A cloud hung above, unlike any that had ever been on Earth, but still it was familiar. A beautiful pink rose, its petals lightly coated in a morning dew. As they opened to greet the new sun, droplets of water sprung up into the sky and came down like cool orbs of infinity, each their own little world. The ground was flat, but at the edges of the autumn forests were green mountains in every direction but one, meeting the deep blue sky. And in that space was a spiralling city that moved into the rose petal clouds. It was built from thousands of miles of computers and calculators--electronic brains. The city seemed endless, thinning out only the slightest bit as it fell upwards. Alice grabbed a tulip from within the shelter of the grass and stuck it in her bright, white hair.

And then, she smiled.