September 2026

Achlys by Andrea DeAngelis

I am the eternal widow. I came before Chaos, that gaping wound. I am the abyss which swallows wide open wet dark. The original quickening with no one to notice my embryonic tapping.

I am the first. But I will also be the last. Because if I am the mist of death, who will pull its dark comfort over my eyes? My eyes tear and fog, but I will never be released from life. I will free-fall in isolation as the universe expands into nothingness, voiding itself, every part of me stretched into hollowing regret, my joints forever swollen with pain. It doesn’t matter if the universe is expanding or recoiling because I will always be infinitely alone.

I have grown gaunt on the battlefield. Every time someone dies, they drag shreds of me with them across pulsating space. Like the galaxies outside of my limited flesh, I will never be drawn into their orbits because I am breaking down to my bitter chemicals. I am becoming what I was before I surfaced from the broken dark; sulfurous and caustic. Any softness I had has shriveled to powdery dry flesh. I leave my dust everywhere I linger. Inside I am alkaline, corrosive.

My immortal mind is failing, its components fraying in the spreading dark. Even gods and goddesses are made of atoms, atoms which can be weakened and ripped apart. Time will end then. I relish such an ending. My world has grown smaller and smaller, the dissections go on forever, splitting me to the end of my endlessness.

I am misery but who gave misery its name? Violence begets life and life is ruthless in its living. Death is withdrawing like a snail into its shell.

Oh, how I’ve wanted to die. I held my breath until I burst. But I kept being regrown and reborn. No one is meant to be alone that long in the immeasurable. Eternity deforms you. Endless time grasping like a spider’s inexhaustible web. Only the dying see me as I draw the mist over their eyes so they find their way to the void. All that is left of the dead is their radioactive fade into cosmic oblivion. Their flesh will dissolve, no longer an impediment. Then their memories scatter and wink out. In the underworld, everyone has their place. It is softer where they go, if only they knew heaven and hell are interchangeable.

Both are netherworlds, full of half-light and half-lives forever decaying and lessening. Their opposing edges create and desecrate the unclaimed and uncharted territories, the unmappable and the infinite, what there is no language for.

I am fully misery now, worn to bones and weeping, my teeth loose in bleeding gums, my knees arthritic. My cheeks are scratched from who would not go willingly, ragged bloody streaks begrimed with death. Time is measured by the agony of my deteriorating body.

I am the first orphan, the egg and also the chicken.

But the egg came first.

No one sat on me waiting for me to be born, not even a widow bird with its long black tail feather. I was born into impossible cold, the arctic spite of an absolute vacuum. I am the original null set, bracketing absolute zero.

My dreams before I was born consisted of a cacophony of clamoring noise as if my skull would split open and explode. An entire amniotic sac cocoons me, a murky dome of shadows and slurs. Its center is the absence of all color, a void within a void, sucking and wanting. Being the first, I should have the gift of prophecy. But when I slit my caul with a long fingernail there was only silence.

As I consumed dark gray layers of inner membranes, ashen and translucent like obsolete film negatives, I grew conscious. My sustenance had no taste, a miasma of gases. My limbs began to bud, stubby malformations of flesh, my fingers frail growths.

I emerged from the rich dark, ripping seams that continue to leak, never fully healed from my poisonous nails. I pulled myself together from the poorest of elements – hydrogen and helium spoke to me in their secretions. Helium the taunt timbre entwined with hydrogen a breathy reluctance, the overture of an orchestra that never begins. My first real memory is of the empty before names. There were no stars to speak of, just dark and darker. This was when the universe was inexhaustible and inchoate. Now spacetime swarms with sorrow.

Misery swallows me whole like the Ouroboros. Nameless for eons because there was no one to name me until you, Chaos. You were born whole, exploding from my yawning thoughts. A grim chasm opened in the darkness sucking indiscriminately. I wished you into being. But I am not your mother. Everything I touch dies. Seers say matter can never be destroyed but it will also never be you or your loves again. What if I refused to draw the mist? Would you see me then? And being seen could I die for once and all time?

Even with you here, Chaos, I still couldn’t sleep. My hallucinations worsened with your touch. Your graze on my emaciated limbs was a novelty but you groped me with increasing force until your fingers became cold speculums. I craved desolation then. I never knew I had a gender until you. Did you make yourself a man to hurt me, taking on the form like a sharpened ornament?

Why did you lie? Did you not want anyone to know about me? That you who created all life didn’t create me?

I am expanding, growing emptier until all that is left is unending and also the end of everything.