The Seventh Veil

Act 1

It all began in the 2020 pandemic. Salome was born into isolation; an underweight, premature, screaming ball of flesh left in an incubator, bereft of human contact for the first 90 days of her miserable little life. She wouldn’t have known who her mother was or that she even had one except, at insufferably long intervals, a disembodied voice announced that mommy was there to see her. She didn’t understand the concept of mother. She understood only the existential suffering of isolation.

Naturally, her mother wasn’t allowed to visit often due to the soaring death rate. The hospital overflow unit they’d housed her in was at a distance from the main Covid ward, but visitors were still considered too risky. Nurses came in, on occasion, looking exhausted and defeated behind their masks. At least, Salome assumed they were nurses. Impossible to tell what was really behind the double masks, face shields, goggles, hair nets, layered gowns, and gloves. Salome’s first impression of humans was that they were 90% plastic.

She wasn’t entirely wrong.

She spent the first year and a half of her life with minimal to no contact. She and her mother were sequestered in a small, one room flat in the heart of the District. People all around them were dying. A father type person brought food to the window several times a day. Onlookers, perhaps family members, came to the window masked like bandits, longing to touch her tiny toes with their gloved hands.

Act 2

Salome pushed an errant clump of once curly, now matted hair from her eyes. She squinted hard at the horizon like she wanted to murder it. In truth, she did. Salome moved the toe of her boot against the carcass of a dead snake; a long black slithering daemon. It seemed like a bad omen. The red clay terrain yawned out before her; long veiny cracks and deep jagged crags punctuated a landscape of misery. Dark red, brown-red, black land juxtaposed with azure skies; cyan, turquoise. If she followed the deeper crag that was once a river, she would most likely happen upon a shanty village in the ruins of the former nation’s capital. She walked deliberately through the red clay; heel, toe, heel, toe.

She seemed to be having difficulty breathing. The air was thick. She swallowed in dust, exhaled fumes. She was running on fumes. She desperately needed water. Brutal beams of sunlight beat down upon her. She was quite certain the sun wanted to kill her. The sun was a relentless, vicious thing intent on making a human sacrifice of her, but she wouldn’t let it. Not yet.

Salome pressed the heart shaped locket against her thigh, into the heart shaped bruise it had formed there. Small reminder, small mercy. The ache of it reminded her that she had once felt something other than pain. She had once felt human feelings. She remembered, she thought.

As she struggled to differentiate the smaller cracks from the deeper crags in the swathe of red clay, she wondered how long it had been since she’d seen another human. Months, maybe? She needed to focus. Her depth perception was distorted from the severe dehydration and general fatigue. The river hadn’t flowed in years. Who knew how many. Bones decorated the riverbed, scattered about like runes. She knew all too well the grim fortune they foretold.

She sighed heavily. She thought about her lost lover, Krayia, and it made her chest ache so deeply that she nearly doubled over. The ache was profound and infinite. Thinking about Krayia punched the breath out of her, immobilizing her; a literal heartache that dropped her to her knees. She wasn’t even being hyperbolic, she insisted. It made her wonder: How had she loved another person so deeply? So selflessly? And how could it be that her love for Krayia had sustained her, had been everything to her, yet had amounted to exactly nothing in the end?

But Krayia had stopped existing the way other humans existed, sometime ago now.

Other humans existed.

Didn’t they?

Act 3

Salome figured that she’d walked about 7 miles so far that morning. Gauging by the sun, it was nearly noon, so there was still a chance she could make it to a shanty village and trade the heart shaped locket for water before nightfall. There was an equally likely chance that she would die before she got there. Or be killed for food when she arrived.

She’d lost count of how many days she’d gone without water. She’d eaten a few grubs yesterday. Yesterday? No, that couldn’t be correct. Could it? The truth was, Salome was dying. Any amount of water would only prolong the inevitable as her conclusion was foregone.

The absurdity of reality struck her then. She kicked small rocks - dashing them recklessly across the uneven terrain. The red clay land stretched out before her like an impossible dare. Red clay, over brown, overthrown, overbaked, deep crevices and crags, once rivers, now bled dry. A monotonous litany of hopelessness.

Salome heard its scream before she saw the vulture. Scavengers were the only living animals she’d seen in years. There must be something freshly dead nearby. Or was it her they were after? Was she that close to death? Were they circling overhead, forebodingly, just waiting for her to die?

She blinked up at the wide open cerulean sky where the beasts swirled in a cyclonic brown haze. She looked around to see if there were any other things, living or dying, attracting the vultures. Then, quite unexpectedly, she saw a figure in the distance. Or thought she did. It couldn’t be, but it seemed to be. Across the arid land was a figure. Go figure!

Shook, Salome smacked herself across the face. Her entire body felt numb. She laughed, a little unhinged. A beam of sunlight blasted down, razor blading its way through the dense atmosphere. How dare it? Why was it leading the scavengers directly to her? She had to keep moving.

Thirsty ground, arid, abysmal land. Clay cracked underfoot. Heel, toe. Inhale, dust in. Exhale, fumes out. Breathing was a negotiation. The figure might have water. Salome put her hand in her pocket and closed a fist around the heart shaped locket. It was her only bargaining tool. She loathed to part with it, but it might come down to that or a fight to her death.

Salome thought: If I die, who will remember Krayia? And her heart broke again, for the millionth time. That’s what life does, she thought: It takes away everyone you love and forces you to endure without them.

Her body moved mechanically forward, over the red clay, under the expansive sky, throughout the expanse of time. The relentless insistence of nature, she supposed. The red clay cracked. Heel, toe. The silhouette of the approaching figure waned, then abruptly folded in on itself. It didn't make sense! Reality was a slippery bitch. The vultures seemed too near. Time didn’t seem to be moving the way it ought to be. Things were altogether confusing.

Salome had to stay focused. She squeezed her fist around the heart shaped locket until it hurt. There! There was the pain, her old companion; it was part of her, it kept her anchored. What would happen if she released her pain? She wondered. Would she cease to exist? She couldn't contemplate it. She had to keep moving forward. So, Salome marched on as the world kept spinning in rapid circles around a sun that was trying to kill her. Step, crunch, heel, toe

She threw back her head and attempted to laugh again, but her body was too weak. She collapsed, crumbling in on herself. The figure was there, upon her, like the red clay, upon her. Everything blurred. Salome couldn’t see anything farther than her foot. All of existence amounted to the red clay on her boot. Everything else slid out of focus; became distant, soft, softer. In the distance, vultures screamed.

Her mind drifted to Krayia. Krayia, like Aristotle, had been an unapologetic actualist. The only time they’d ever argued, it had been about Aristotle’s chicken or egg query.

And why do you think actuality trumps potentiality?

Because it already is.

But ‘already is’ is boring. It leads to complacency. And what then? Potentiality is everything. Rather, it’s anything. Aristotle’s egg - what’s inside? His argument is predicated on it being a chicken, but that’s absurd. - It could be anything. Any. Fucking. Thing.

Salome blinked. She forgot what she was thinking about.

The figure knelt down next to her. Salome saw that the figure was a woman with long, fiery red hair and a crooked grin. She had lost the capacity for speech, so simply held up the locket to the women as an offering. There were no words anyway.

The woman understood that Salome needed water. Of all absurdities, rather than giving her water or even inspecting the locket, the woman leaned in and kissed Salome on the mouth.

The woman pulled back and offered a hand. Salome shook her head. The woman indicated that the village wasn’t far, but Salome held her ground. She looked the woman squarely in the eyes: they were captivating emerald explosions, fires barely contained. Salome averted her gaze. The eye contact was too much. She resented anyone being able to see her.

The woman gestured again, this time more insistently. Red clay, blue skies. Swirling, crashing, bold colors, cyclonic vultures filling the sky in alternate hues and pulsations. Time moved strangely. They existed outside of time. Time didn’t exist!

Salome pushed the locket into the woman’s hands. She took it and held it up to inspect it. At length, she pried it open and a bit of powdery white dust fell to the ground. Morosely, the woman turned her eyes toward Salome’s. She felt cheated. There was supposed to have been a secret there. An answer. Or, if not an answer, at least a clue. Something that would suggest, at the very least, a vague sense of purpose.

Instead there was nothing, the woman noted.

“No,” Salome said in the most even voice she could manage with her dying breath, “It’s the exact opposite of nothing. It is everything. Or - it has the potential to be.”

It’s the egg. The egg is what matters.

“Screw Aristotle!” Salome spat.

Salome stared up into the cloudless sky and contemplated the circling vultures awaiting their meal. She hoped the woman would take her share first. Although ostensibly disappointed that the locket was empty, the woman looked down at Salome affectionately, with something like love.

It pleased Salome to feel something, anything, as she shut her eyes to relinquish hold. As she exhaled her last earthly breath, she saw the woman backlit by the punishing sun. It looked like she was wearing a halo. Salome didn’t believe in angels, but the woman must have been one. It was the only explanation. The woman leaned over and kissed Salome on the forehead, tenderly, then moved in closer and whispered in her ear,

“Hope springs eternal.”

It was a bit trite, but Salome was dying, so she'd take it.

Then, the woman grinned conspiratorially and said,

“By the way, I get it. Aristotle was a moron. Screw him.”

Salome smiled; she was finally able to release her pain. So this is what happens, she thought as she shut her eyes and ceased to exist.