Humanity has been wiped out except for you, who managed to eke out a meager existence by yourself. Every day, an angel visits you and asks if you’re ready for humanity to return. Every day, you respond, “No, not yet.” Today is different. Today, the angel brought the Devil with them.
I never travelled before. I would have said that I didn’t have the time, or the money, or that I had nobody to travel with, and that would all have been technically true, but it wouldn’t have been the whole truth
There’s a fear to travelling, of opening yourself up to new experiences, of broadening your horizons, of ripping yourself from a place in which you have roots and touching down somewhere that is not your own. A fear of encroaching on the roots of others
There are no others now. So I travel. I visit cities and villages, bearing witness to the monuments of those uprooted others who left them desolate and yawning. I wander forests and mountains and seas, where no roots were laid and humanity was never more than a visitor. I explore libraries and bookstores, raiding those words that were laid down as deliberate wards against this same violent ripping of human lives from the earth that sustained them
Every day the angel returns, and every day it brings me the box. In Paris it appeared as a many-headed beast, all arms and limbs clamouring to support its impractical frame. It appeared as a set of spinning concentric runed rings deep in the Black Forest. It was a swirling tornado in Rome, and a many-faced marble statue in Budapest. It was a great rising head made of sand in Istanbul, and swirling colours in the sky over Damascus. Every time it appears with the same words, “Do not be afraid”, and offers me the box
“Where are the others?” I asked it once, in the ruins of Petra. It was a great bird of prey made of light that day
“They have been called. The righteous to our gardens in Paradise, the wicked to the pits of damnation in Inferno. They can be returned, if you only open the box.”
I did not take the box. I never take the box
