Dreams of Angels, and the Falling Thereof

Ministration 2.1

Her blood clung tight to my skin, like so many droplets of frozen red rain.

She was lying on the ground in front of me, eyes wide, staring blankly at a starless sky high above. For a moment, I was certain my legs would fall out from beneath me. I pressed myself against the brick wall, trying to quell the pounding in my skull, to push away the spinning dizziness that make the world around me seem to be spinning.

I stepped forward. The moon pierced through the clouds, to leer at me with the faintest of pity as I approached her. I bent beside the husk that had once been her, cupping that mangled face, cold as ice, against one shaking hand.

Each time one of my tears rolled down my cheek to land, carelessly, on hers, her icy skin began to steam. Coils of mist rose up from her, reaching upward to bite at my tender skin, swiping scalding claws across my eyes.

In this instance, a moment of time stretched across an eternity, I knew I should not be here. I should have ran, before whoever did this saw me too. For all my fear, I could not muster an emotion more powerful than the grief which turned my legs to lead, that stopped the gentle beating of my heart.

She began to melt.

I held her, with all the tenderness I could manage. As my hands pressed into her glacial skin, the ice began to dissolve beneath my fingertips. To my dismay, her skin itself soon followed. Whatever traces of warmth still within her vanished as she flowed, so slowly, through my fists. Like honey, I thought. My voice seemed to be a million miles away, echoing down at me from some cavernous space in the back of my subconscious. That honey, so wretched and sweet, passed across my arm. As it went, it began to seep into my pores, seeming to slip just beneath the skin. It animated me from within, setting my skin to twitching wildly and with reckless abandon. Cold pain stabbed through me, a dagger of ice aimed right for my heart. I sobbed, wretched sounds racking pain across my body, tearing whimpers and screams from my lips in turn.

Before too long, my arm was entirely encased within that fluid. It had oozed through flesh and muscle, surrounding my bones like some impermeable resin. It moved, beneath my flesh, tendrils of the fluid creeping through my veins, reaching up to my head to trickle into my brain. My thoughts clouded, filled with cotton and a cacophony of voices that were not my own. My vision turned to sludge, staccato disruptions of blossoming black spots dancing across my eyes, resembling such noisy static. My tears stopped falling.

Numb, I sat there until the bitter cold, and the honey, and the grief had seeped so deeply into me that I could feel none of them. I would have stayed like that forever, if I could. My vision was growing dark. A machine, hooked up to my arm, was beeping. Footsteps echoed towards me. A flower bloomed from my stump.

A snapdragon.

~~~

I sat up, and stumbled from bed. Something hot had begun to rise in my throat. I moved with a start across the motel room, slamming open the bathroom door with one arm, staggered to my knees before the toilet, held back just long enough to lift the seat, and retched. Just as I began to fall forward, my other arm shot out, manifesting itself as a long crutch to keep me propped up. I sucked in air, and bent over again, watching, as though from a thousand miles away, as my insides were turned out.

Eventually, I stopped, my body finding nothing else to expunge from itself. My throat, burned by a deluge of acid and some very bad teriyaki sauce, strained to suck down as much air as possible. For those brief moments, I had been certain that I was drowning.

My normal arm, I quickly found, was far too weak to lean on. Luckily, my manifested limb did not tire. It was not wracked with sweat and fitful shakes, and held steady as I pushed myself back up against the peeling wallpaper. The cold tile beneath me, however dirty it might have been, felt good against the exposed skin of my legs. I was half considering resting my head against it, when someone knocked at my door.