woodendreams:
(by Laszlo Gal)
A story from the first world. From the days of Christianity and Innovation. When the paved roads were still unbuckled and the cars still ran. From the days of faith. And stars in the sky.
A fairytale, if you will. Or a fable. Since there’s probably a lesson to be learned.
Once there was a man whose job it was to save the world. He was the second kind of martyr. Not like Jesus, who the stories say died for the world. It was this guy’s job to keep living for it.
He must have been murdered ten or twelve times. But his feet kept coming back to the crust and the dirt. And he kept walking those paved roads and climbing those impossible mountains. He kept nailing himself up on those metaphorical crosses, and throwing himself in front of beasts and buses, and every time he did, the angels brought him back.
He was a bad dude, this guy; the second kind of martyr. His heart was all carbonized and black. And he liked killing.
He was a martyr of the kind of world that had bombs and guns and kids dying homeless in stone cities like giant graveyards.
Anyway, an angel fell in love with him. And that was sort of the beginning of the end.
There was this disease that coal miners got in the first world. It was called black lung. They went down into those unlit shafts of damp and shadow, and the coal dust and the black mold got into their lungs and coated them in filth. And then their lungs started dying before their bodies did, turning gray and hard. They rotted from the inside out.
That’s what this angel’s love was like. He fell down into that black carbon heart and the rot got inside him.
The thing about a rotted love is that it still feels like a good love. Like a right love. So this angel, he thought he was doing good. When he worked together with this man, he thought he was stomping out evil and purifying the world and Heaven together.
This angel became the second kind of God. Not like Yahweh, who made the world in seven days and sat back to watch it spin. It was this God’s job to set things on fire.
Maybe that’s an extreme way of saying it. Maybe it wasn’t his job. But that’s what he did.
Sometime in the twenty first century, the man went missing. Him and his killing, black heart walked south, down into the desert and no one ever heard from him again. And he must have eaten his own soul and digested it or something, because he never ended up in Heaven or Hell. He was just gone.
That poor, love-sick God came down looking for his martyr. And when he couldn’t find him. He burned the world down.
That’s it.
Okay, so I lied. It’s not really a fairytale.
It’s just history.
But my little girl, she asked me the other day why the all the trees are red and the skies black like coal dust. And I didn’t want to tell her: ”Baby girl, the world is still burning down.”
So I told it to her like a love story. And then I put her to bed.
