The Universal Absorbent by Phoebe Reeves

The City found itself with a problem: what began as a natural hole in the earth where Its citizens had thrown away their evil had helter-skeltered into a voracious toxic Abyss. The City thought it could wash it away by pouring water down the hole, but that only made the evil float to the surface. It had heard about an Angel that was sent to another place to deal with the problem of evil and that that place had finally (and stupidly, so thought The City proudly as It would never be as stupid as that Other Place) destroyed The Angel and that microscopic pieces of The Angel drifted about the land wreaking vengeance.

But that was not going to happen to The City because they knew better.

Not wanting to assume responsibility for something The City’s Central Council members were convinced in their hearts had been created into them by The Powers That Be (TPTB), The Council told Siri they needed TPTB to send reinforcements instantly. And so as not to inconvenience TPTB with needing to use Google Maps or some other inferior GPS (but at the same selfish time, to ensure TPTB knew exactly where The City was), the Central Council members poured cobalt, copper acetoarsenite, and other aflatoxins into The Abyss and set the poison stew on fire.

 The City required its citizens to void their evil in much the same way as they might lose their stomachs after too much intoxication and to be public about it so that there was no chance for the evil to fester in secret. Since modesty was also valued a la confessionals and children were valued as purity, The City confiscated a sandbox that babies had played in, brought in an excavator, and gorged a hole.  A sign that said The Hole pointed in the right direction for any citizens who might be unsure. A complimentary sign on the “when you were done” side of the hole said The Whole and pointed the way back to The City.

Citizens came and vomited all their evil into the hole: carving swears and swastikas into starving dogs, abducting babies to use as shields in fatal high speed chases from the law, and other real and unimaginable acts. Tourists heard about the hole and came to discreetly cleanse themselves. The hole corroded into The Abyss. The City had tried collecting a utility fee (for the tourists, it was called a “toll”) from each person for the privilege of purification, but the fee/toll collectors all developed first rashes, then open sores, then body putrefaction, then staggered away or died there at the edge of The Abyss.

In the blink of an eye following the simultaneous Siri request and fire offering, The Angel appeared and crouched over The Abyss, its massive wings flaring out like so many monstrous eyelashes. Now The City was prepared to host, but not to be in service to this silent stone being whose mouth was filled with row upon row of razor teeth like the maw of a shark. Endless lines of people stood to carefully or carelessly lean into The Angel’s midnight throat, whispering, screaming the worst things they had ever done and walking away purged, without a thought as to where all that regurgitatedhorror was going.

Prior to their demand of TPTB, The City had researched the previous Angel and how It’d turned black and rancid from the effluvia of confessed human evil leaking out of its mouth. The City assumed that TPTB would this time send a bigger Angel, one capable of universal absorption. But as The Central Council completed its regular inspection of the perimeters of The Abyss, they found Its containment of toxic waste seeping into a now not so distant lake, a life saving migratory stop in the middle of an arid wasteland for all the remaining birds on the continent.

Concerned by the optics of identification as a leading contributor to the end of the world as humans know it, The Central Council donned riot shields and pouches filled with flashbangs and stormed The Angel. The Angel’s googolplex of eyes swirled one way and Its infinity of feathers swirled in the opposite direction. I have eaten your evil and am in your service for eternity came The Angel’s thought inside The Central Council’s heads. The Angel lifted Itself off The Abyss like a bird getting up from its nest, and all the people in line and some of the Council members nearest The Angel screamed and fell into The now gaping Abyss.

A lone man who’d taken on the task of keeping the migratory birds off the deadly acid bath that had once been their precious lake oasis stood nearby. On his shoulder was perched a Cliff Swallow. One of the Cliff Swallow’s wings was a normal wing of bone and feathers. The other wing, which had disintegrated in the toxic lake when the Cliff Swallow was a fledgling, had been lovingly remade by the man the way a child might create makeshift wings for itself: using driftwood and a photograph of the man holding a smiling baby pointing up at the sky. The man whispered to the Cliff Swallow who flapped its wing made from the picture of the man’s beloved baby daughter and flew into The Angel’s maw, all the while singing a language only it and The Angel could understand. Moments later it reappeared, more beautiful than before, singing, singing, singing, both its wings now whole and bearing the shining image of the man’s beloved baby daughter, and returned to the man’s shoulder. And The Angel returned to nest on The Abyss.

Pheobe Reeves

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay – angel towering over a city