A tear rolls down my cheek as I shakingly hold the last letter he wrote me.

Carefully skimming each word, remembering how it felt when he meant

those words to me.

Fuck. 

I sigh, throwing the paper down, laughing to myself.

Tears stream down my face as I chuckle.

Then I realise my significant other is right behind me.

I quickly snap my head around to make sure you're still asleep.

There you lie, soft and sound, wrapped in the quilt that is big enough

for both of us, yet you manage to take all of it.

That's fine.

I won't sleep much tonight anyways.

I don't want to dream of him tonight.

But I always do.

I always will.

You see, 

there are demons that enter my mind

They fill me with dreaded thought 

All the time

They light my dreams on fire

And drown me with false hope and desire

They sneak silently through their world and ours

To torment us for the hours

The ghastly things drip with dread 

That they pour into our head

They stench with hatred and sorrow

Trust me darling it won't get better tomorrow

Horrifying creatures with mouths that bleed

Inside your darkest nightmares they'll plant their seed

And it will grow

inside your gastric pits it will blow

and sink into the depths of your system

and then you shall become their victim

falling prey to the virus that stretches out your mouth

slowly sinking its teeth in your chest; headed south

straight to your heart 

this devil will start

bleeding inside and out

til it kills this drought

The wind growls at your soul

begging you to come home and toll

til the night is upon your head

twisting through your spine the dread

you thought you left long ago

you're begging it just to go

Now these ghastly ghouls 

slither with slime

and maybe that is a sign

that this is the last time

so take a breath and 

line

up these monsters will

steal your soul on sight

hush now be quiet hush now be still

no longer will your light be bright

This is the end 

I am your only friend

whispers the one with the devilish grin

begging you to let him sin

grabbing the blade he controls your mind

and he controls the time

the closer he comes

the more you go numb

your essence draining out

you have time left but you feel this is your only route

before you disappear 

begging you hear 

but late it is

too late it is 

for you to go back

their empathy they had to lack

but you're never coming back

It was most obvious in the cities at first. With so many people in one area, it was a matter of statistics. At first everyone thought it must be a virus or something, but no dice. The reason for people swelling up, choking, dying? Allergies. People started developing allergies en masse, and no one knew why, let alone how to stop it.

Pretty soon it was everyone. Not all the allergies were severe, thankfully, but if you had eaten something, you were now allergic to it. Pretty soon hospitals were distributing food substitutes as fast as they could but for most people it was a matter of figuring out which foods wouldn't kill you immediately. Malnutrition can be nasty, but everyone thought that they just had to wait it out until doctors could figure out what was happening.

Unfortunately, the allergies weren't static. They just got worse and worse over time. People who thought it was safe to keep eating something because it just gave them a rash would be going into anaphylactic shock by the end of the week. It was possible to rotate between a few foods to stave off the inevitable, but only a handful of people had access to that much variety by the end.

Ultimately, though, what no one could deal with was the allergies to medicine. Anyone treated for allergies became allergic to allergy medication. Anyone who had prescription medicine had to face their conditions unmitigated. Even painkillers were now potentially deadly. That's when people gave up on the hospitals.

And that's how humanity finally died out. Surrounded by all the resources they could possibly need, they starved.

I had two eyes once. They were blue, I think, or green or gray or hazel or possibly all four, a patchwork of sorts of mixed blood and blurred family lines. Mestiza. My skin was brown the way coffee mixes with milk, the way someone adds just a dollop more than expected of cream into bitter cocoa, how sometimes I, either too far gone into a daydream or too busy arranging pots and dishes onto a silver platter, would let the cornbread bake just moment too long in the oven. I had two eyes once -- in the days where my greatest concern was ensuring that the master of the house had his coffee and breakfast every morning, when I would watch almost wistfully the corn and cotton harvesters toss their gatherings into baskets taller than I, surely more profitable than I, most definitely holding greater freedom than I could ever achieve in their long journeys to the processing plants in the next plantation over. I was fifteen when I was bought and brought into the house. Had never worked a day in the fields outside in my life; I was too pretty for that, no, too fair-skinned, too light-eyed, so steeped in the in-between of the similarities and differences that separated my master and his other slaves that it was almost odd, it seemed, watching me run errands around the pristine, columned house as if I were a common servant. I supposed I looked a little like a piece of antique furniture by the way he stared at me, what with my blue-green-gray-hazel eyes and strange, not quite completely dark or light complexion. A trophy.

I had a child once, too. This particular adventurer, even beneath her thickly rimmed spectacles and layers of worn robes and scarves, looks a little like I thought she would be: short, stubborn-looking, with corkscrew curls and freckled, sun-kissed skin. My thousand eyes lazily regard her as she trembles amidst the bodies of her fellow peers.

I’m still picking my teeth with a particularly sharpened thigh bone when I ask: “And what is it that has brought something as young as you here, my child? I must admit that I do not receive many visitors such as yourself very often -- not live ones, anyway.” Her expression catches between something like confusion and fear behind the blood-splattered spectacles; I laugh, forcing her knee-deep in the carnage again. “You’ve survived the arrival at the gates of the world and this guardian has decided to spare you, young one. Isn’t that lucky? Now, before I lose my patience --” My maw snaps shut, grinning, an inch from her face “ -- SPEAK.”

She manages to catch something -- a small journal, how quaint -- out of a particularly large pocket as she presses herself into the red, wide-eyed “O-of course, of course!” She adjusts her glasses on the bridge of her nose, fumbling with the dampened pages. “I’ve spent a good portion of my higher schooling researching the gates and their beasts -- angel, I mean to say, the proper term is an archetype of such -- and I do know the proper terms of seeking questions and answers heavenly beings such as yourself, ma’am. Give and take, it always is, it always is. And I believe I’ve written quite a few notes about you, so if you’ll just let me find it ...”

Noisy. Irksome. Now completely engrossed in acquiring a greater amount of knowledge to expel from her incessant, rambling mouth. Somehow I can’t bring myself to devour this strange, cheery human -- not with her bouncing mass of blood-matted curls, not with the delicate dappling of freckles just over her cheekbones. Especially not with dimples I could remember as clear as the light of day, of the thousands upon thousands of inscriptions keeping me trapped within the crumbling walls of the sanctuary, of each and every nook and cranny I'd gotten used to accommodating with my colossal, feathered frame over the past two or three hundred years that must have passed since the death of my daughter. I'd lost track of time after that point. The noisy human pauses at a particularly dog-eared page, genuinely smiling now like Clementine, like Clementine, like Clementine, and I see my baby girl for a moment, bright, warm, crying and calling out my name as I traded my humanity for her mortality in that split moment between myself and my baby and the cotton gin and that winged humanoid thing, gently cradling the edge of my chin as he offered to --

The rambling human is rambling again, announcing questions and pieces of history as if she hadn't just watched the rest of her noisome expedition group fall to story-tall jaws before her eyes. Hadn't traveled thousands of miles to the middle of a mountainous nowhere and survived a near-death experience not to receive one or two more notes for her research journals, I suppose.

I decide to listen.

It's been three years. Three years of time not moving. People remain exactly where they were when I started this. I told myself a minute. Just one extra minute. But a minute turned to two, and two turned to a day and so on. Now, three years later, I'm the only one that's changed. A beard covers my once clean shaven face. Hair drapes to my shoulders and wrinkles have started to take hold of me. But she lies there, still perfect. Still lovely. Still alive. She told me to move on when she goes. But if I never let her go then I never have to move on. But to some level, it's cruel. Keeping her here for my own pleasure. I know I have to let her go, to stop her pain. I also know that once her pain stops, mine starts. Finally I make my peace lean in and kiss her on the cheek. With a wave of my hand the flow of time resumes. The machines hooked up to her start sounding off again. The nurses in the hall go about their business. She turns her head to look at me. I can see a tear forming in her left eye. She mouths the words "Thank you" and the inevitable flat line is heard. Time is a precious thing, it heals all, and it kills all. I feel my heart stop. For the whole world, time moves on. But for me it stops.