Unlawful and Unnatural Manipulation

I was one of the last to die. Certainly not one of the lucky ones: the chosen ones, blessed by the witches’ locket.

Earth.

Destroyed by humans on the hunt for witches.

Saved by witches on the run from humans.

The reveal of magic sparked the New War. Not a World War. A War on the World as we fought against ourselves.

Magic (n.): The unlawful and unnatural manipulation of worldly energy.

A long-kept secret now exposed for the world to see. It started with the little things. A ban on magic. Witches whose livelihood depended on the shealing potions they brewed lost everything. Then, anyone with a proven history of witchcraft was rounded up and burned at the stake. Modern day witch trials broadcasted on every channel for the world to see.

Bile clawed its way up my throat the first time the screams exploded from my TV speakers. Images of women chained to pyres set up in an old football stadium. The humiliation of soiling yourself in front of the entire world. The sound of blood-curdling wails as flames kissed her body, enveloping her in the boiling heat.

After a year of daily broadcasts, the executions became normal. Watched mindlessly over dinner. I always told myself better them than me.

The first time the witches fought back was also the last. Four of the eight women on the pyre that day combined their power. They managed to set the stadium alight, but it wasn’t enough. They burned with it. Nothing changed. The incident became evidence of how unnatural magic was, how it didn’t belong in our society, how witches would do anything to use their powers to hurt us.

Though we didn’t know it, the end had become unavoidable. The mere thought of a witch was enough to eradicate offices. Schools. Whole towns, cities, states. The extinction of humanity and for what? Misunderstood power? A fear of magic?

They told us the witches came straight from the fiery pits of hell, unhuman, and here to destroy humanity. They told us our children burned for a good cause. Two hundred dead kids were better than one living witch. They told us the cancer riddling our bodies, poisoned by the air, was a less painful death than what we were doomed to face if the witches survived. A generation tainted by trauma and terror could rebuild, heal. But a world with witches could not. A world with witches was an eternity of suffering.

My daughter was the first to leave us during the first wave of attacks on civilians. In a moment of anger over a child’s grade, a father called a teacher a witch. Their solution? Bomb the school. Every child, every teacher, every chalkboard, locker, and backpack, reduced to nothing but a pile of ash. My sweet angel joined thousands of others as dust blowing in the wind.

Her death broke something inside of me, but I soon learned to be thankful it was quick and painless. Her death brought me a sick comfort. She didn’t have time to fear her end, suffer as many of us did. Though she lost her life before me, mine was doomed before hers.

Every single adult woman was put on a list long before the civilian attacks began. They slowly poisoned me. Slowly poisoned us. Death proved my innocence. And my survival? Death had always been my fate.

It began with my teeth. My gums bled at the slightest touch; the brush of my lips against my teeth rattled me to my core. White-hot pain shot through my face. My vision went black as I chewed through my food. One by one, they fell out, leaving soft, tender holes in their wake.

When I lost my first tooth, I collapsed to the floor of my bathroom, soaking the white tile with my tears. Tears for my teeth, tears for my daughter, tears for our world. When my last tooth fell out, I didn’t notice. By that time, I was more concerned with my flesh.

Soon after losing my first tooth, my skin became dry and flaky. Then red and itchy. Then black, as if rich ink spilled across my body, my flesh dying. I was rotting. My own putrid scent made me gag as my skin decomposed before my eyes. As I dry heaved into my toilet, bright pink pieces of my mouth came out. A hole through my cheek, exposing my gum, filled with yellow-white infection: scavenger bacteria feasting on my corpse. I was alive in the sense of consciousness, but my body no longer functioned. Gas built up inside of me, pressed against the graying skin of my abdomen until the volume was too much, and I burst. My insides were on the outside. Splattered on the walls, a soupy puddle on the floor. My intestines fell through my ribs, and I tucked them back in, overwhelmed by a strange desperation to save any organ I could. Sinewy muscle and ligaments began to show, no longer covered by skin. Soon, my feet were bones, stripped of all soft tissue. I was a skeleton from the ankle down. I held my tongue in the palm of my hands. I couldn’t even cry as my eyes had sunken so far back into my head, no longer serving any purpose. I was disgusting. The living dead. I wanted to die. Deserved to die.

Living as a rotting corpse wasn’t enough for them. The blast from the first local nuke killed everyone within a fifty-mile radius. If not instantly, then the radiation did the job. At the edge of the blast, I again was not one of the lucky ones. I could do nothing as tumors grew on my body like fungi on a log. They took over my heart, suffocated me, clung to the little skin I still had. I could do nothing. I could not move, I could not speak, I could not see. But I could feel. I felt the weight of every cancerous mass as they suffocated me. I could feel the shake of the earth as bomb after bomb came down. I could feel the break and separation of my bones when they finally found me, still alive, and dragged me across the crumbling remains of my neighborhood. Rocks pierced into exposed muscle, finger bones left me for good, forever forgotten in the rubble.

How did I live so long if not for magic? The very thing they claimed to hate, a weapon against their people. The end of the world.

When I finally felt the heat of flames licking at my broken, undead body, I experienced pure euphoria. The end was so close. And then, I felt nothing.

No one is left. Not them, not the witches, not me. At least for now.

The entire world is gone. Oceans dry, buildings dust, plants wilted. Nothing to signal that life once ruled the planet. Except for one golden heart-shaped locket, undisturbed in a fallen city. Humanity’s last chance. Souls hand-picked by the witches in the final days. Stored in the locket for safekeeping, to reemerge once the world has a chance to heal. When the air is no longer toxic, when the oceans have filled, when the dirt has become fertile once more. When life no longer means death. Only then will the magic free the souls entrusted to build a better and brighter future.