Sample chapter from my first novella 'Amen'

by Issara Edwards
28th December 2012

Angel Boy.

The air is thick, the clouds moving across the sky like they're being pushed from a big chimney, or maybe God's smoking today. God would smoke cigars, illegal Cuban ones. There's water quaking under the pressure of vehicles as I listen to the air breathe and the trees whisper. The air tastes of bitterly sweet smoke that burns the back of my tongue and throat like acid.

My art study isn't... flowing, the way I would like, everything has to be good, nothing can just be...

Not many people believe that there is anything beyond the four walls they consume themselves with, filled with the possessions bought and stolen from hard-earned dysfunctions in capitalism. Yet accepting there is more out there is still not believing in it, it's only acknowledging the existence of it but in no way soiling oneself on the decadence of it. And that makes me sound like an even more pompous cross between Lucius Annacus Seneca, and Lord Henry from the 'Picture of Dorian Gray'.

I only brought this up because I believe I don't believe. I have an acceptance of what goes on outside these walls of spirituality and chains. I accept that people out there are in so much pain, following the first rule of polite conduct, surviving.

Outside is dangerous... but still, to touch that world would be to feel at my most alive.

But the world's going to end soon anyway, apparently. It's going to begin with an attack on the USA and end in nuclear war, and I have no idea what will happen if it happens, in my selfish manor, me first. I don't know whether I'll go to heaven, hell, reincarnation or just cease existing, everyone’s worse fear. I'd like to have all my memories either way, even the bad ones, and retain the ability to think. I could float around within outer existence and complain non-stop about it.

What's been depressing me is the fact that everybody leaves after a while, I've been sat here in this loneliness... but even people who aren't alone are alone; I think we have to do something about that, if we have time. If this world ends, what would be the point of all this?

I'm not afraid of everything ending, I have no fear anymore, just this white shroud I stand in as I throw the petals from the white rose off the edge of this snow-covered mountain. As I stand on this edge of reality, sanity and mortality.... The sky tears grey and tears fall and form ice on the ground. I feel like you're out there, the one person I could never let in because you're already there. You hold my hand sometimes but I'm still stood here alone. It's not that I'm searching around my own backyard it's just that you don't exist and all those fake love stories are wrong. Everyone's alone.

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