Gargoyle

by Marisca Pichette

Colours swirl and die in fire along the Edge. The light grows and darkens into nothing.

Crisp, velvety nothing, collecting demurely at the Edge and crowding around until all the colour is forced at last to the bottom of the world, hot and dying in explosive splendour of red and orange. One watches this most of all, feeling the warmth on one’s face before the all-engulfing cold that comes with the dark.

Sometimes, there is nothing but grey. Sometimes the colours leech out of the world and condense into freezing, angry drops, pummelling face and eyes and back. They slide along wings and dangle from claws and tongue. They suck the emptiness from the sky and congeal into a frozen shell, covering one’s body until claws are no longer visible, disappeared under colourlessness.

Sometimes, the storm is brief. A flurry of grey Absence and pregnant cold. Then yellow dashes out from above—no idea where, but it comes from Out and destroys the absence, infusing grey with warmth and light again.

One rejoices each time in the thaw.

There is no telling what happens past the Edge. Things fly over, propelled by time, and never come again. Some are smaller, some larger. Never the same one twice, they shift constantly as they fall out of the world.

They always move. That’s how one can tell that they aren’t alive, aren’t the same as one.

Only dead things flee the boundaries of the world. Only dead things fall over the Edge.

One knows this because the dead never stop like one. One feels the cold but never cracks, sees the light but never fades. One’s perch is static, solid, unchanging. One endures in a way the dead never do. The dead are in constant motion, flashing and disappearing like light and dark and Absence.

Watching them pass, one is alone in the world.

As forces and colours shift, ghosts fly across the landscape. One watches them always, eyes open, eyes unmoving. So much moves, so much dies over the Edge when the light fades. One thinks that it is not so bad to be alive, even when storms beat against one’s back and wings.

Where one sits, it is flat and exposed. One’s view is fixed, but the vista changes. Always ghosts fly past, contorting as they melt from Out to Edge.

After each collection of hours, the colours run together, dripping and bleeding down the fabric of the world to collect at the darkened bottom. They die in explosive splendour, and after the long silence of Absence, are born again in the Behind, rushing each other around and down, driving spears into the black, until colour fills the world again.

One lives to watch the always war between dark and light, between colour and Absence. Poised before a menagerie of flitting, foolish spectres hurling themselves over and through the world, one wonders sometimes what it is like to move. What it is like to die.

One does not know what becomes of these moving ghosts when they slide out of the frame and over the Edge. One thinks only that this must be the end of all things, the end of stillness and colour and life.

Marisca Pichette stands outside on winter nights, listening to stillness. More of her work can be found in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Apparition Lit, Flash Fiction Online, PseudoPod, and PodCastle, among others. Her speculative poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is forthcoming from Android Press in April 2023.