by Isis Grimalkin
A spire reached out from the plastic castles of the acropolis like a human hand reaching for the trigger. The surrounding earth was ash, and from it grew cellophane sunflowers. In their radioactive ultraviolet petals, a tempest of colours swirled and collided as in a drop of gasoline. Blattodea took a deep breath and cringed at the hydrogen scent of that burnt-out planet. She inserted a crude sunflower petal cigar into one of her aereoli and took a drag. Smoke poured down from her skin, and in her crystalline lens vision it looked like her life pouring out on the floor. A faint tapping resounded through the chamber, emanating from the door.
“Alwaysss late,” she hissed. The oothecae was due to hatch.
Blattodea crawled along the floor and undid the latch. She tore it open, and the phantasmal smoke dripped through it into his face, enveloping the cilia of his thorax like mist in the deep of a forest.
Pvakyis, too much a man to cough, held his breath. The flash of infrared sun-rays which streamed through the window, illuminating his lustrous amber exoskeleton, was for Blattodea a flash of desire. How muscular were his six legs! Not to speak of his antennae. Radium, he was divine.
A deafening crack resounded through the chamber, emanating from the floor. In a second, the world was falling apart. The end had come again. The stratosphere was burning. The earth’s crust was breaking. This time, all organic life would cease to exist. Mother Nature doesn’t give third chances. The noise came again, like the smashing of a human skull, an insect stepped on. The oothecae hatched.
Pvakyis and Blattodea hungrily gazed as the nymph cockroaches, their children, seeped from the egg case. Starvation and anticipation were too much for him. Pvakyis clenched his pincers around the abdomen of one of his young. Its mouth hissed, a scream for one without a larynx, as its exoskeleton was pierced, the liquid flesh siphoned from its body. A solitary drop of clear blood spilled to the dusty ground. Waste not, want not. Pvakyis, legs twitching in cannibalistic delight, snake-like tongue rolling out from between clicking pincers, drank the sweet substance into his fiending malnourished frame. Blattodea, in a corner of the castle’s citadelian ceiling, was vainly licking the dust from the laugh-lines of her scaly segments, watching her lover gnaw on a still-spasming leg. In an insectivorous paradise, he savored the aroma of visceral, diced cockroach liver, the raw protoplasm smashed in the teeth of his gizzard.
Silence. The hollowed shell of the oothecae lay on the plastic floor like a bit of phallic crust on linoleum. A cloud of pheromone scent surrounded Blattodea. A magnetic tractor beam for masculinity. Plutonium, she was gorgeous. Her eyes must have three thousand lenses. How they gleam! Spectral, haunting, almost radioactive, her beauty. So slowly, leg by leg, she drifted towards him. Lustful shudder, as she turned him on his back. Wings crushed, as she slipped her pincers into his abdomen. Intestines awry, muscles severed, her turn now. Spleen punctured, sweet clear substance trickling, his life began its leave. Scream-like hiss. Ejaculation. Murder, murder, and a full stomach.
Blattodea rested in a pool of warming red sunlight and clear cockroach blood. With a content sigh issued from her ever-clicking mouth, she drew her legs in flat against her body. The incandescent cigar smoke which still lined the corners of the chamber slowly mutated into the misty edges of a dreamer’s vision. She was no cockroach; she was human, thirty-four males tall. Towering below a dream city of light and sound, she could feel the night air cool against her human skin. The sky was no longer red. Starbursts of coloured light exploded all around her. Smooth metal stroked snow-cold against her abdomen. She watched reflections like memories twinkle and dance as a flame in the cylindrical barrel of the metallic insect. Beautiful, as sunflowers opening in the morn. There were humans all around her, phantastical, striding elegantly on pale white pairs of graceful stretched legs. Around their mouths the scaly skin parted to reveal flashing razor sharp teeth. A metallic leg kicked out from the insect on her side, jabbing into her intraskeleton. She drew it, how remarkable the way it fit perfectly in her mammalian hand. What a strange insect it was. Alien. As she sadistically pulled its only leg towards her, expecting it to wince, it screamed with thundering pain. The explosive blastwave sent her to the ground. Next to her lay another human, eyes blank, wondering, staring. Sticky red liquid. She lifted her hands, red.
“Ssstrychnine, the lecture!” She jolted from sleep, her eye lenses focused to see the sunset, brown as dead leaves and decay, on the horizon. It was late. It was likely that Professor Dictyoptera, Head of Scientific Historical Studies at Nihilsapientia University, had already begun his lecture on humans. Blattodea’s six legs thrusted her down the four-hundred-seventy-eight step staircase, down the grey plastic spire, through the dark ash-strewn streets, toward the college. Catching her breath before the great styrofoam door of the lecture hall, she silently cursed herself for forgetting the lecture. When she pushed the door open, its creak brought every eye upon her. A slight mechanical whir rang over the silence of the hall like a blank audiocassette.
“Asss I wasss sssaying,” Dictyoptera rattled, in a voice too deep for his stature, “the humansss were capable of building ssstructuresss over ssseven thousssand malesss tall, although their own physssical ssstructure wasss quite inferior to oursss.”
Blattodea took her seat in the second to last row.
“You can sssee here, I have a reconssstructed human intrassskeleton. If you will noticcce, it isss an exxxellently pressserved ssspecimen deccceasssed well before the Human Fall, asss there isss no charring of the ossssssificated sssurfacesss, and fragmentsss of cartilage remain intact. The measssurement of their brain sssize in relacccion to their overall massssss wasss a mere racccio of one to forty. You already know, of courssse, that our thought procccessssssesss are much more advanccced becaussse of our highly evolved cranium ssstructure and itsss dissspersssion throughout the body…”
Shifting in her cold aluminum seat, Blattodea leaned forward to catch every word.
“Being cold-blooded creaturesss the humansss’ fassscia were covered in ssscalesss. They frequently required laying in the sssunlight to maintain a sssteady body temperature. To pressserve temperaturesss during the night it wasss necccessssssary for humansss to ssshut themssselvesss in metal or ssstone boxxxesss. Sssometimesss the eldersss of a herd would passssss away while asssleep, which acountsss for why ssso many ssspecimensss are exxxcavated from metal boxxxesss. Humansss were, in fact, ssso ill-adapted that an eight-hundred roentgen dosssage of thermonuclear radiacccion proved lethal. Thisss assside, the lassst of the human raccce possssssessssssed enough nuclear weaponsss to dessstroy their world twenty-sssix timesss over.
“For quite sssome time now our ssscientissstsss have possssssessssssed the knowledge needed to create dessstructive weaponsss infinitely sssuperior to thossse of the humansss. For exxxample, take the PRIDE GOETH, which isss capable of producccing well over the sssixty-ssseven-thousssand roentgensss needed to kill a cockroach. Needlessssss to sssay, the day will never come. Our ssspeciesss isss sssuperior. From the Human Fall came the Nuclear Winter. From the ash sssnow of that winter we bloomed. We are the Ssspring; we are the Dawn of a New Age. Our ssspeciesss isss sssuperior. We have learned from their missstakesss. What ssshall I sssay? The meek have inherited the earth.”
Meanwhile, two hundred kilomales away in a windowless grey plastic government castle, a decision was made for the public safety. The order was given. The trigger was pressed. In a second, the world was falling apart. The end had come again. The stratosphere was burning. The earth’s crust was breaking. This time all organic life would cease to exist. Mother Nature doesn’t give third chances. Fire poured from the sky. Flesh became fuel and furnace. Paradise and permanence were lost. Blind and burned, nothingness and blackness were all existence. The flames were pure, purging all sin. Judgment had passed; none stood holy. The end, at last, had come.
