She sweeps the city by night, the sound of her shoes echoes through every clear alley where the homeless go un-missed. They call her Lucifer and yet she is their savior, there are dollars in empty cans and breads in paper baskets. There are many things strange about her, and her airs are the least of them. She is elegant and saintly and stiff like a marionette, though her hinges move swiftly she seems made of wood so crooked is their movement. There is something off about it, though none dare put their finger on it. The moonlight casts pale shadows across her dark face, though her skin is as white as paper her eyes and mouth are rimmed with a brooding, powerful kind of black. They say with her cloak she carries the sky, though on rare occasion they do have distance to reach out and grasp it between their grainy fingers it always seems heavy, absolute and enveloping in a way their starless night sky mimics perfectly. They say a lot of things, the scattered and un-missed. They call her Lucifer and yet believe she is their savior.
That is how she is known by the night, by the day she is the quiet and solemn. Her wide eyes and full lips make her Mary, but she does not speak to that name. The girl next door knows. The neighbor downstairs knows. And yet the greater part does not. Three years and she's said two words to the priest at the confessionals, but two words are too much to listen for a man of great virtue. There is something wrong with this world that she could put her finger on easily, but she does not speak of it. The girl from school knows. The boy from break knows. And yet the greater part does not. The greater part has not felt her anguish; she is glad they never will. A part of her enjoys that there is a world for there to be something wrong with this time around.
She is depressed, she is angry, she is sick, she is pained; so says the doctors and physicians: "One dose, one drop, one miracle will cure her! It is in this bottle, this can, this box! One dime, one dollar, one hundred will cure her! One for this bottle, this can, this box!"
She is delighted, she is calm, she is healthy, she is fine; so says the parents and all family: "What a change, what a hope, what a light, she is cured! She has fixed herself, to smile, to grin! What a worry, what a bother, what a fright, she is cured! It is not herself, to smile, to grin!"
She has learned there is no appeasing this crooked world, she is new to its welcoming hug and its sneer, the best she has tried to do is learn to bear it as the others do.
One night she ventures out to see him, he recognizes her somewhere and other parts he does not. He says they call him Karl, which is a joke even though it shouldn't be. They would talk much but there is only a little time for talking. She glances at his gentle figure as it appears in the filtered light through his balcony window. It must be his dream to have such a window, but she knows she is not the lover he is waiting for. She does not want to be.
He has kept dark hair and his skin is mild; when she says this he laughs bitterly that the hair is dyed but he couldn't fix the skin. He lets his hand graze through his hair as he speaks and his fingers stop just northward of his temples and ponder the hair and the thin skin. She leaves by the window and says nothing more, though she knows she might never return. It is a cruel world, and she is very aware that she is part of it.
Once a man asks her why she is awake so late, she is young and she is beautiful and she must be schooling still. She says she is keeping the bags full under her eyes because they are a cultural sign of youth, and though that is true it is the smallest part of the reason. She hates the being tired almost as much as she she hates the sleep.
The mother that she will never accept takes her to church each Sunday and she begins to believe in the human race. The priest says the consolation for this bitter life is that We will be saved upon Our passing, but she knows what death is like and she knows that they are wrong, she knows the aimless wandering through long forgotten memories and she knows that all there is or will ever be is being trapped in her own network of little personal pasts. For her there are few sweet memories that are not more painful then the worst of the bitter.
She is trudging through the trenches when she finds who she has been looking for. The reunion is brief. She receives an address. That is all she really needs.
Night comes and she stands on a balcony she is welcome to. On the other side of the glass is Rose, whose skin is still fair and whose hair has been cut short again. She uses her true name, the name she had almost herself forgotten; Kanaya. That first night she cries to Rose on the bed, she recounts every moment as she weeps onto the bed and realizes that every moment she wished for Rose to be there. Rose looks at the black robe and hood almost laughs, it is a reminder that they are in fact the weary and thankless gods. A god or a saint, Rose says to her, or perhaps the virgin Mary who bore the child that saved humanity. She knows she is not a saint, nor is she any Mary, there is nothing she could do to save humanity that she has not already, but she believes that somehow with their preaching and their own believing they could somehow save themselves.
Rose knows her grand secret, what keeps her separate from the humans, what sets her apart from Karl. There is something there that was left, that should have been taken when she was dropped down to earth.
Church again every Sunday, a pattern and a ritual that all the people with their phones and their briefcases seem to like. Everything is scheduled and she wonders if life is always like this. Would she be the only one if she decided to run away to her own alternate ending? There is something in Church this time that strikes her. She knows the secrets of life after death and she knows how the earth was created and destroyed and born again, but she does not know who coded the game. These frail creatures revere the light of a creator they do not know but still manage to believe in, they see something that they hope for and they try to make it a real thing. It is foolish but she is foolish, she is alongside them looking for solutions to unfixable problems and as the cross on her father's necklace weighs heavy on her chest she thinks there is the possibility that she is not so different from them after all. Perhaps they are right, perhaps there is a great being who coded the game and is out there still looking for bugs to fix.
When she starts praying her Mother is worried, when it continues her father worries as well, but with it's consistency over the span of a month they both soon calm down. She must be seeing the light, they think. She must have started to understand.
She holds out for the whole of that month, she thinks she can do it but she starts to crack during school, and that one crack divorces into several. By the night she is shattered and their savior is for the moment gone. She's breaking the banks of all her moral penance and she drinks quickly and senselessly. They were young and healthy and a promise to herself is splintered completely. She feels guilty of the red though she knows now that it is no longer something she should be aware of. When she's cut she bleeds scarlet too, another reminder of something she's trying hard to forget. But it just keeps coming back to her.
She was not careful and she grows worried, there is no food or money for the hungry tonight and though she tries desperately not to think of her actions, she does. She does, and they hurt her.
The game has bugs but clearly there is no one out to fix it. Her usual stops have conglomerated, they are all one in her mind. Only a group of people, distributed. She does not want to see them but she walks by them anyway, empty hands in full view. They are burning broken crates and she watches as the smoke snakes upwards through the clogged and dirty air.
She eases her broken faith to its shallow grave and kneels by the pyre in solemn and mocking worship. Shall she be their savior she shall die from them as well. Rose knows. Karl knows.
Damn to hell whoever decided that they should lose themselves all besides the worst parts. Even Rose isn't worth knowing that she is letting people die so often for her own selfish needs. Perhaps if she had a happy memory it would be knowing that the step of hers down the clear alleys of the un-missed homeless would no longer be a mildest threat. Perhaps it would be knowing that she would no longer be haunted by this ghost of herself, fighting her humanity in the traces. An end to this chapter, perhaps?
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen." she whispers and takes a step forward to the fire.
There is something wrong with her coding.
She is their Lucifer and she lives for the fire.
She is their Savior and she is immortal at best.
She sits in the smoldering ashes as the morning rises, she will not be Mary for anyone.
The ashes stir under her and she finds a nail from the crate. It is red with the heat of the fire and she takes it into her mouth and swallows out of hope and out of desperation.
There is a bug in the game and no one is out to fix it.
She sweeps the city, unscathed.