Fin de siècle

The sky was on fire. In the west, a violent orange glow blossomed out from a point that seemed just beyond the horizon. Black clouds were climbing out, erupting into petals of grey that gently floated to the zenith before disappearing into insignificant wisps of rain.

A giant fetus was descending down from the sky. From beneath the bridge of steel, I could see only its body; its head and legs were out of sight behind the buildings to my left and my right. The hue of its skin was a golden yellow, but it was an unpleasant sight, the skin of its form draped with dripping eidolons and an unspeakable horror exploded to life behind my eyes.

Men ran screaming in all directions. Some of the women fainted; they were forgotten, left behind by a madness ripe with sourceless fear, a disbelief that stretched their consciences toward puerile humor, to laughter. A rejection of this real and unborn child into a pus-filled boil, and a "pop!" later, it would be gone with it, too. And they would all be left standing, laughing, and then they would pick up their wives and go home to television sets.

The children themselves stood and gazed, but it was a silent and voiceless agony that rooted them to their spots, the picture of the prophet reflected brightly in the tears in their eyes, a form moving slowly but steadily to meet them. It was an encounter and they were meeting their creator.

I shuddered to think what might happen if the child landed. There was no way to know, of course: never before had such a thing happened. There was also the chance that other such fetuses were descending from the empyrean around the world, over large cities, overs people, over running men and swooning women, over praying children, over me.

I ran. I didn't run away from the monster but I ran to get under it. In a moment of brilliance, I positioned myself right under the approaching form and waited with a knife held up towards it. I waited. It seemed to come closer and closer. After an hour, I was sure it would fall upon the knife and bleed to death. But no, it covered the entire sky, blanketing all humanity beneath a shroud of half-alive and surely malformed skin, the stench of it disgusting, filling my nose with the pungent indulgence of sulfurous and sulfidic gases.

The world was dark. Humankind was tottering on the brink of extinction. I had given up all hope when the fetus awakened from its strange sleep. It woke up and began to cry, to bawl. It was the last mourning.