Last night, I dreamt of an apocalypse, but it didn't go like things usually do.
I'm no stranger to the apocalypse narrative — Usually it's nukes. Atomic annihilation. We take cover, we sob, we hope for the best.
But that wasn't what happened this time. It was something a little more intriguing than that.
I was on some sort of tour. Perhaps it was a school class, I don't know. I wasn't myself — I was someone that was also AFAB, but with long auburn hair.
Light streaked across the sky in fierce flame, catching the attention of all before being obscured by the treeline as it touched down.
Everyone looked.
Then, that flaming light spread in a shockwave toward us, but not quite reaching, incinerating all it held in the distance.
Screaming. Running. Trampling. I was trying to tell them that there was no point — More were falling from the sky, destroying the land around us.
No point in running.
It would catch up to us.
I looked to the sky once more and found myself in complete pause.
There was a door.
A closed door, mind you, and inaccessible, but a door nonetheless. A door suspended hundreds of feet in the air, white paint on wood with a silver doorknob. Somehow I knew, then, that this was a god's doing.
A god that didn't care to save us — he was the cause. He had no desire to save what he had decided to destroy.
Shaken from the realization, I looked down to my arm as it burned and festered. A large lump bubbled under my skin, growing larger with searing heat. It was as though my skin was boiling.
It grew bigger,
Bigger,
Bigger,
And it popped.
A spray of blood shielded my vision with an agonized scream. I don't know who it was that was ushering me to shelter; all I remember is passing a sign that I didn't have time to make heads or tails of before passing out.
When I woke, the hole in my arm was much smaller, though unbandaged. Not sure what they did to manage that, but I was in a cabin with several others seeking the doubted option of life and preservation.
There was debate on what it all could mean. Some speculated that it was the rapture. Others thought that it was like the extinction of the dinosaurs. Some thought aliens. Only I was the one who knew the truth. I had seen the door.
God didn't provide a rapture. He was killing indiscriminately, and making us all suffer. I knew what he was doing — I knew the strategy from art class. He was scraping his canvas clean to start over.
That meant he had to kill everyone.
We avoided sunlight. Eventually, we boarded up the windows of the cabin. We scarcely went outside. Those that did, often didn't come back. Our numbers dwindled into nothing.
I don't know what became of us all, but I know that it could not have been good.
