Year of the Butterfly
an excerpt

Chapter One:

Shelves. Through the smog-like film of dust, empty shelves stood in open defiance of the empty building. Shelves upon shelves upon shelves stared bleakly at the white walls, a room enveloped in shadow. And there he stood, with pale splayed digits, wiping the furniture clean. Rubbing, smearing, destroying the dust and grime.

Light… if there had been any, it weakly trickled into the room through age-old holes in the wall. The enclosure didn’t seem to mind the constant darkness; it was as if old company, a black blanket laid upon a dead child’s body. There, beneath the ground, he’d keep that camaraderie, that delicious memory of the heat that once swelled in his heart.

Then, there was nothing. As if the creator had snapped everything out of existence, the creation vanished from view. The reality of the dreary emptiness swallowed him whole, spit him out like waste from a public trash; it chewed upon his limbs and gnawed at his fingertips like a flesh-feeding termite. The agony of this dank, desolate place… it shook his body as if a lifeless corpse, beat at his chest as if it were a drum, and dissolved his existence in the blink of an eye. The buzzing atmosphere filled his ears with a warbling uneasiness; the signal seemed to spit, crackle, and pop, no longer in tune with the wavelengths of reality.

“The truth of the matter is,” nobody in particular hissed through the spasm of foul connection that seared the airways, “you are really dead.”

Tick, tick, tick. The clock, merciless and with sickening monotony, seemed to reach out a decrepit hand and tap him on the shoulder as a reminder of the inevitable.

The darkness began to crumble, evaporate, vanish back to the depths it came from. The smog seemed thicker than ever, the cloud of dusty smoke diffusing over the room in thick, meaty clumps. Outside he heard children’s voices. Window shoppers? But where were the windows?

The reception repaired itself. Coughing in this unsettling murkiness of the air, he reached out a hand, probing and groping for the renewed signal. The dull hum of a computer reached his ears; the cold, clammy, crumbling hands of the clock wrapped around his throat and became solid again. He couldn’t even manage a wheeze.

“My name is Zachariah… and you have stolen something precious from us. We want…”

He didn’t have enough time to cover his ears.

“Gabriel.”