Rose Blumen ~

(Eschran)

My husband died between my arms on that day. When I was feeling sick and like my head would go its own separate way. My body was pulsating painfully, but I survived.

We managed to survive together for a little while, in the middle of this road that had come to a halt.

He inhaled painfully, with growing difficulties every morning there in agony. He fell ever so gently and frail while I was looking at him.

His body passed like breath through mine. His last words were encouraging me in a whisper.

Before I could realise, he was gone, staining me, and leaving me to go mad.

He turned to clothes and paint, staining the ground and my arms deeply.

I recall having a moment of laughter, unable to believe that could have come to pass.

It dried over time. He was gone, and I began to really suffer that other kind of pain from there on.

Around me, others were crying or yelling all the time.

~

I smelled the ashes. I smelled the thunder in the air, as darker rainy clouds approached. We shouldn't stay on this poor dirt road I remember thinking in my daze. We waited for help to come for too long already...

Most people and what had become of them were now like me beginning to move away from that darker sky looming from beside.

I was still holding onto some of his clothes, watching the twilight turmoil.

People and other things more whimsical were scattering away from this highway.

Everything felt slower or faster to me. I was sluggish, holding the grief as my hand dried. Let night come, I thought for a while. Closing my eyes to the budding rainstorm, trying to think about his presence and face still near to me.

Now, it's alright, I thought for a while, trying to make peace last.

I'll join him in heavens, I laughed to myself again, while the acidic rain began pouring from above. New yells began to ring.

~

I didn't lie. I just pray for mad desires, of heavens and reunion with my dear departed one.

I've come to worry for my children as well, while the skin of my head began to flake off. I ran to hide and live.

I crawled like others in the nearest opening to undergrounds we could find. I fell into the depths of older constructions that felt like tombs, holding my melting skin and flawed sanity.

I collapsed somewhere down there, and slept again for days. The underground buildings were wide.

I molted entirely gradually, confused, suffering, unable to think clearly more than a few words at a time.

My children, they will make it...

I cough, I spit, I change. My head is boiling and leaking. My clawy fingers try to hold onto the scraps of clothing I've saved, from him and mine.

I crawled deeper and further randomly, acting on instincts more than clarity. I wanted to dig my way out of the sorrowful rain outside.

I started living as a rat for a while, intelligent but wild. My humanity was forgotten for a while.

Tremors regularly shook the ground and walls, causing me to run deeper and deeper.

Few other people made it down there under that harsh rain. And the others I lurked at, they didn't go very far.

Not that they all died down here. A few might have. But most of them remained in the early and shallower places from which they could still monitor the weather outside, and avoid trading deeper in the dark...

I crawled in filth and endless tunnels, reconnecting an old metropolitan network, looking for myself as if I was young again. I recall running on all four limbs in the dusty corridors as if I was a child again, and enjoying the fun of it.

I remember laughing as I hurt myself in the pitch darkness of this lost underground world.

I remember fighting with real rats or other critters for pieces of fallen animals to eat.

I ate what I found, without real sense of taste for that while.

I walked along my four limbs as if that was natural, forgetting every day a little further what it had been to be human.

I remember spooking the survivors still clinging to each other in the main hall when I came closer. I must have looked horrifying and feral in many ways. My head hurt and I recall scratching and hitting it to make some unwanted noises and lingering pain go away. It worked, maybe.

I came closer to them and out of the deeper world, because parts of my humanity eventually returned gradually.

They were far fewer than in the early days of our burrowing, when I glanced at them from the shades.

Once they saw I was arguably human, they relaxed a little and tried to help me.

My vertebras realigned loudly over the next days where I relearned to stand on just two legs. I revolved my way to civilisation as fast as I had fallen away from it.

Clothed again, I looked at myself, unable to comprehend anything of this passing folly.

Life awoken had become like a long dream sequence, with sudden changes and shifts that maybe appeared logical at their individual levels of time.

I giggled often, more than these starving bunches. It was now all very funny to me. My fingers had changed skin too, but some bluish fibres of the denim I had held onto quite dearly were now merged within my own fibres and collagen. These tattoos of the coloured fabric that had fused with me during my time of animal insanity, I often looked at them, puzzled and amused. You're really gone, dear...

When I abruptly stopped chuckling to myself, it was when awful migraine struck me suddenly.

Something is coming. I held my head, clutching to the bright pain. My head filled with waves of light coming from outside and giving me sunburns inside.

It made me want to run deeper into holes again, to protect myself intuitively, although it wouldn't have changed anything.

But along these sudden migraines that felt like shockwaves, I heard voices that made me hilarious again.

My laughter echo loudly in these grim corridors, much to the worry of the other refugees.

I wave away at their visible concern, with further amusement.

E - It's fine, it's fine! It's just that I heard signs, that my children are still alive...

~

They thought I had a phone or radio still working. I didn't.

From another part of this building we managed to rehabilitate without exposing ourselves further to this awfully acidic and toxic rain, we cleared windows to the outside without opening them. We don't know what's pouring along the water lately, but it's barely breathable and really caustic.

This area of Mesopotamia is now entirely unrecognizable. The lush landscape has turned to barren hellscape as far as one can see.

The outskirts of the abandoned city I was near to, are now flooded swamps with rivers of mud. Caustic mists are covering the ground for most of the nights and twilights. The rain is reacting badly with the ground and other things.

I keep grinning nervously, which annoys a lot the more emotional ones with me. This building connected to the ancient subway station will probably sink over time. But it's also likely this rain is closer to its end than start.

We're all starving but we get by with what we manage to catch and ration between us. I'm good at catching rats.

The rainy season usually doesn't last this long. Soon again the sun will shine.

The floods will settle, and this side of the megalopolis will stop crumbling under the chemical imbalance.

I laugh again, looking outside. My children are so bright...

I hear their will and reply with pride.

The headaches from hearing these solitons of electromagnetic shockwaves, they keep coming. They're not real light, nor true shockwaves, but I like better words to describe the sensation they cause.

They're more like radio frequencies and signals that now my brain chemically reacts too. But it feels like glowing waves to me.

I see them washing the place like religious hallucinations, repeating flashes as if trying to signal an advent to everyone pure. I feel like I'm witnessing a new messiah, and he's bringing good news about my daughters to me.

I'm impressed. I'm proud. I grin with all my remaining teeth to the desolate but hopeful land outside.

~