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Fallen: A Short Story

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It is invisible: sinuous and convoluted like an asp’s lethal promise; it glares at her with fathomed eyes as voracious as an angel’s. Fallen. It speaks, and as the words unravel in her mind, they succumb to the acute, momentous burst of forgotten tempest. Sweetness lingers: the fading, chilly redolence of hops and tobacco-smoke, of damp, mouldy stone and an echo of juniper. It touches her, sometimes, caressing both her stomach and her mind, with the memory of something everlasting: a clumsy thing. It is not human. It is obscured, now. But its presence loiters… Her eyes dart like clockwork from lips to thy owner’s: the gift of the dust covered lamps overhead forbearing no apathy to those that it bestows. The air is indolent and smogged; …show more content…

She grimaced. “It is a glimpse of your own unbearable weakness. It is knowing that something must not happen, and it is also knowing that this terrible thing that must never happen has just happened. Lítost is feeling that and acting on it…or not acting on it, which is, itself, a way of acting on it. Lítost is human, and so it is inescapable.” She had already shrugged on her jacket, and had both feet were struggling against the bitter earth of the night, but those words followed her far into its …show more content…

Inert. After a while she reached the outskirts. Breathless, exhausted. Happy. The way got worse, leading into the forest. She kept running. Running away from what she could not escape. She slumped. Struggled to her feet. The bare trees that tried to reach the night sky with their scrawny branches blurred, rotated. She felt like falling. Wasting away, disappearing. Free. Her blue lips smiled. Someday she would be light enough to fly. Another step. Another. One more. One. One, two… three. One-hundred twenty-five; thirty-six; seventy; forty-five; three-hundred twenty-six; forty-nine; .two-hundred

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