Paradiso

The plan had been to die there, in paradise. It had been two years and six months to the day according to the etchings Polly had made on the walls inside her concrete box. One small line with every new sun. Inside of her tomb she had a small mattress that was nailed to the floor, a toilet, a tiny slit at the bottom of the wall where once a day one orb of something edible slid through and an aluminium vase that contained one stem of what she supposed was once a bouquet of orchids. The stem hadn't been watered in the time that she'd been there yet was as alive and living as it was the first day she woke up in the box. There was no door but one wall had a large convex window made of some reinforced material that had been heavily tinted so as nothing apart from the light of the sun and the moon could be seen from inside. In times of desperation she had tried to smash it with her hands and her head to no avail other than leaving a few tiny scrapes that could be wiped away with saliva. Above the window there was an ornate inscription in the concrete that read, 'Paradiso'. This, she assumed, was some sort of feeble attempt at humour by her captors. She'd imagined so many times whoever it was laughing as they hammered a chisel into the wall with extreme and delicate precision. Two years and six months, a long enough period of time that Polly had lost all hope of ever escaping her grey prison. On that 913th day as she sat against the back wall nibbling on the tasteless round thing that had slid through into her box she was surrounded by a great light so magnificent that it blinded her. Her brain fizzed and her ears rang with a screech of a thousand pigs at the slaughterhouse. She curled up in a ball and fumbled her way to the corner, scratching at the mattress praying for it to absorb her like some dried up bed bug. There she lay waiting for the sickness to pass. The screeching in her ears dissipated to a low hum and the fire balls that were her eyes began to cool as her brain began to recognise true sunshine again. She pulled herself upright with the help of the wall and rubbed at her eyes seeing the concrete room for what felt like the first time. The convex window was glowing a bright white as if the dark tint that had been there for two and a half years was suddenly ripped of like a band aid. She took slow steps toward the glow and saw tiny shapes starting to form as she got closer, tiny shapes turning into big shapes turning into buildings and trees. Her stomach flipped with vertigo as she realised that her concrete box was so high off the ground that the street below looked like a penciled line on a piece of paper. She fell back onto the cold ground and hugged her legs, shaking with fear and confusion. She didn't recognise the city in front of her. Was it her city? Was it where she once worked? Where she loved and played? She tried so hard to locate the memories of the alien place but found nothing. She cried and in a fury threw herself at the window, yelling and screaming and scratching hoping for someone out there to see her, to look up and see a woman trapped in a concrete box and call the police or rouse the cavalry. Anything would do, she just wanted saved. With energy depleted she slipped back down to the floor. Her filthy clothes soaked with a salty lament she saw movement from each side of the plastic bubble. She pressed her wet face against the curvature of the reinforced material and saw that there were hundreds of windows on a concrete wall. Bubbles in rows like hives and behind each an insect like her, all simultaneously coming to the same realisation.

"THIS IS PARADISO AND YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED. THIS IS PARADISO AND THIS IS THE END."

The voice bounced off the solid walls in Polly's box with a tremendous bellow, repeating the same two lines over and over again. She clasped her ears but the voice was too loud. She looked around at all the other bubbles, the voice was penetrating the hive, everyone was trying to soften the voice of God with fingers in ears.

"THIS IS PARADISO AND YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED. THIS IS PARADISO AND THIS IS THE END. 10. 9. 8..."

The voice began to countdown. Polly scrambled to the back wall.

"7, 6, 5, 4..."

Her bladder failed her and she screamed so loud that her vocal chords ripped.

"3, 2, 1."

There was a deafening silence and an orange light that exploded and contracted. A sonic boom followed that shook the hive with such ferocity that the box convulsed violently and Polly was thrown around like a rag doll. The room became engulfed in a darkness and the shaking ceased bar the final bits of rubble that had been dislodged by the blast. Polly turned to the window and looked out in horror as the city she had seen only a minute earlier had been completely wiped away. Nothing was left, no bricks or mortar from the buildings, no branches from the trees, no men, women or children, nothing, just emptiness as far as the eye could see. She looked at her neighbours hoping to gain some understanding from their reactions but the look of dolour and dumbfoundedness had been copied and pasted behind every window. She tried communicating with the bubbles closest to her but outside of her solitude no one could hear her banging on the window. Surrounded by hundreds of people yet as alone as before, the dark tint covered the window again and left Polly in a dusty haze.

Her days continued like they had before the blast but this time Polly couldn't differentiate the light of the sun from the moon. She gave up counting the days because she had no intentions of counting down the days to her extinction as she was now sure that there was nothing else coming.

Another 6 months passed, by which time Polly had become so much older. She'd stopped eating and had fallen ill from not having had the energy to get up off her mattress and use the toilet. She slept in her own filth and waited for some biblical angel of death to take her away. "Any day now." she thought.

"THIS IS PARADISO AND YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED. THIS IS PARADISO AND THIS IS THE BEGINNING."

Polly hadn't the energy to react but the PTSD from the voice of God raised her heart rate to a fatal level. It spoke only once and the sound that followed was quiet and fragile. She turned her head to see that it was the orchid. It was withering and dying so quickly that Polly thought that she was hurdling through time at unparalleled speeds. The withering stopped and the orchid turned to dust spitting out a small piece of gold that clanked on the ground below. Polly crawled off of her mattress to see what the flower had given birth to through death. It was a small locket in the shape of a heart and on it was an inscription in the same hand as the Paradiso on the wall that read, "Day Zero." She held it in the palm of her hand but her skin was so thin that the coldness of the locket began to burn through to her bones. She through it at the wall above her bed and saw that it stuck. She rubbed her eyes as she had the day of the blast, hoping to see a little clearer. The locket stayed put. Something like adrenaline started to run through Polly's veins and she managed to stand up for the first time in weeks. As she did the locket turned and with it the the floor beneath her began to shake. The nails that held her mattress to the floor started spinning backwards out of their holes and the mattress swung up as if on a pulley revealing a staircase below. For the first time she heard other voices, the voices of her neighbours that had managed to survive like her. She thought about using her legs for the daring escape but even the thought of it left her feeling week. She sat down on the first step and slid down the freezing slabs like a child. Down she went for an eternity, hearing the voices of the other insects turning from confused to scared to hopeful and everything in between. It took her almost an hour of sliding until she began to smell the air from outside of the hive. She wept uncontrollably as she saw the door and then the earth outside the lip of the concrete building. Her first step outside was weak so she stood and caught her breath. The voices of her neighbours had gone silent, the wind being the sole noisemaker as she rubbed her eyes for one last time hoping she hadn't gone blind. Her eyes adjusted to the light and all along in a great line they showed her thousands of people standing side by side, her neighbours, the insects all outside for the first time in what felt like an eternity. She looked up to see the magnitude of the concrete building, it was unfathomably larger than she had ever imagined, she came to the conclusion that surely she had only been half way up. Polly and her neighbours looked out onto the open plain that once was a metropolis to see what they had seen the day of the blast, a vast plain that held nothing but mud and mire.

"THIS IS PARADISO AND YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED. THIS IS PARADISO AND THIS IS DAY ZERO."