My grandma used to say every terrible thing will fade when that blessed day comes, my dear. Now that it’s finally happening my only comfort is that she isn’t around to be disappointed.
Sometimes I try to imagine what she would say if she knew that the ‘blessed day’ would involve airborne gold spores eating through the throats of the elderly, or that pearly gates the size of semi-trailer trucks would spin across states with the fury of tornadoes, or that apples would stop rotting, no matter where you buried them.
Tonight the sky is obfuscated; ornery, perhaps, at the increased amount of observation it’s received over the past eighteen months. The gold triangle is still visible, hovering above the Earth like breath on frosted glass. I wonder if any of my friends across the country are seeing the same view and sending end-of-the-world wishes towards me.
Our city was the first on the East Coast to lose electricity. A patchy connection sometimes filtrates through the porous blackout, but it always overloads my phone and then it jams. It doesn’t matter. Well-intention prayers will not save us now; in fact, they’re the reason why this is happening in the first place.
The news keeps calling the looming triangle inexplicable. As if we didn’t spend generations praying to God for exactly this.
*
My earliest childhood memory is of the Preacher telling me that Heaven was as real as the knitted doll in my hand. Heaven was a golden pyramid lodged in the heart of what masqueraded as the moon; when we’d repented enough, God would bring it down to Earth and relieve us from mortal misery.
The rhetoric got my grandma’s generation through the first Continental War and mine through the second. I’d search the bomb-heavy sky to see if the pocketed surface of the moon was opening up to release Heaven to the rescue before my best friend Eli Summers got blown apart in the playground. I’d whisper to angels in between the pulse of raid sirens because I knew that they could hear the smallest sparrow fall, and my hysterical pleas were definitely louder than that.
Tonight, as I’ve been doing for the past three weeks, I wrap up in my warmest coat and put on rubber work boots and head to the abandoned building site. I don’t blame my employees for leaving; there’s likely not much use for housing complexes once Heaven finally touches down. My presence here is to engender my own delusional hope. I’m a builder at heart, and I won’t let this be the death of me.
It’s hard to say exactly when I started losing my faith. All I know for sure is that God isn’t out here in minus twelve degrees as I try to jump start the hydraulic drill for an idea so crazy I don’t bless myself with the words to describe it.
*
When I was little, even before the Continental Wars, I thought the best day of my life would be when I went to Heaven.
Imagine a four-year-old wishing she was dead because nothing else could be as all-you-ever-wanted as Heaven. I’d cross my thumbs and touch index fingers to make a triangle and hold it up to the sun, or I’d ask my grandma to find fallen bird feathers for me, convinced that one day there would be an angel’s in the mix.
Grandma died before the gold spore infection that killed most of our senior citizens. Even in her last days in the hospital she’d ask the nurses to collect feathers for me. She’d wash them in the bathroom sink and dry them on the hand towel. I didn’t tell her then that I’d outgrown belief in a magical gold triangle. I don’t tell her now either, as I talk aloud while waiting for the drill to warm up, that as of yesterday there have been over two thousand cases of stillbirths with snow-white feathers sticking out of purple-blue infant orifices.
Heaven is an epidemic no one knows how to cure because it was the antidote meant to save us. Angels are so near, my dear, was the last thing grandma ever said to me. It feels more like a warning now than it could have ever possibly been.
*
The drill finally kicks in. I brace my heels as the earth heaves, weary and deep.
This daily self-ascribed mission started a few weeks ago, after a pearly gate caught in a gale flattened an entire kindergarten. I knew then that it didn’t matter what my grandma or the scientists believed – this divine trajectory would never change directions. It was here to kill us all.
But if the faith I’d suckled at from infancy was upside down, then maybe, just maybe, the opposite was true too. Either way, working the drill a few inches further down every night was the closest I’d felt to holiness in years.
The phone inside my shirt pocket buzzes, another random patch-through in the static. I pick it up to look out of habit. Maybe I’ll finally see a text from an old classmate or breaking news of another aberration. My head is turned to the left, so I can’t see what force suddenly pummels me, sending me cheek-first into the vibrating earth.
My teeth jostle inside my mouth. My brain feels gelatinous with every shock wave.
Earthquakes are new.
My skin blooms like a boil. I can’t scream because something enormous is either descending or emerging, flattening my lungs with an impossible compress. Did Heaven finally descend? Is this is how I die, crushed by golden walls that shatter the troposphere?
Then the pressure alleviates. My jaw loosens to inhale dirt. Everything around me tastes dark, bitter. Sulfuric.
My body is still shaking, but it’s moving in one defined direction: down.
I don’t dare open my eyes and jinx my newfound faith, but just in case, I ask the devil to carry me home.
Elena Sichrovsky (she/they/it) is a queer disabled author and cult survivor. Their work explores religious trauma, grief, and identity through the lens of body horror. You can read more on its website http://www.elena.sichrovsky.com, Instagram @elenitasich, and X/Bluesky @ESichr.
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