As if the world knew the Sun were missing, the sky is filled in with a murky grey and the house slouches forward, threatening collapse.
The bodies therein behave similarly - Pallid faces exchanging glassy glances at mealtimes and sparsely if ever in between, the soft steps of any one person moving into the acoustic hollows of a once-vibrant home sounding with the weight of the world amongst the absence of life.
A home once full to bursting has in a week devolved into a ghost town with a population of only three, each of them ghosts of another kind, haunted by ghosts of their own.
A rapping on the door that once would have called the palace to its toes becomes a petulant game of 'not it', and it isn't until you're sure no one else is willing that you pull yourself from a coil of slow, autonomous breath and cold blood to see who dares stir the stagnant water here.
The murmur of the living room television drowns the sound of your leaden bones dragging down the staircase; Some plastic feigned shock about an unprecedented celestial phenomena, some vague description of the scene in layman's terms to keep the uneducated from feeling stupid. You watched the initial airing with wide, burning eyes, but the follow-up since then has felt more like having your cheek ground against the pavement.
You try to ignore it as you begrudgingly flick open the locks on the door, and your skeptic half-crack gets blown open almost instantly by what awaits you on the other side.
A beautiful stranger, golden-blonde and teetering gently from one side to the next barely meets your eyes before pushing the fallen comrade cradled in his arms towards you. "Take this," he says, as if the dead(? Sleeping?) body of a Seraph were a palm full of spare change and cowry shells.
Your eyes run over the figure of tangerine and rose as he settles over the bend of your elbows, an arm beneath the serpentine curl of his tail and an arm beneath the extension of his chimeric wings, limp beneath him. He weighs almost nothing, no more than an infant - A young and ignorant Atlas, knowing only himself and not what monuments his presence alone bears.
You step away from the door, angel in hand, to allow the weary traveler passage. His face is dirtied with char and blood, broken shards of porcelain chess pieces pierce the flesh of his forearms, and the too-familiar torn clothes he's tried and failed to wrap his wounds with haven't fit him since he was a child. He collapses into the space you made for him, an egregious golden statue of an idol uprooted, and the plush carpet begins to pool red around him.
It isn't characteristic of you to cry for help - or to raise your voice at all - but with the heat of fresh blood seeping under the balls of your feet, you know that you're unqualified to even approach this alone.
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