Emmeline, the girl in the storm

One hundred percent dead

"You weren't expecting that, were you, my love?"
Emmeline's head snapped up.

"Ahh, see there, that's the anger I was counting on."

The god leered down at her. Melekh. He was taller in this world than he had appeared in his realms on earth. The god of death and child sacrifice. The monster who had fathered her with intent to sacrifice her so he could cross between worlds. Oh how his plan had bitterly failed.

"You are one hundred percent dead." Emmeline told him flatly and walked on. She was so tired and done-with-it-all, that the momentary feeling of dread and horror that she felt died in her stomach long before it effected her countenance. Somehow, she wasn't surprised to see him there, existing and all.

"Death is just another state."

"Sorry, perhaps I didn't word that right," she inhaled a short breath, "You were DESTROYED. You were pushed into a crack between worlds and you ceased to exist," Like typing in the wrong password, but you thought you almost had it right, and when you click on the box again, the password has gone. Damn it, how did you spell it again?

But Emmeline didn't say that. He wouldn't understand anyway, he wasn't a creature of her world. Neither was she, to be honest.

"Go away." She said, flatly.

It didn't surprise her when he vanished. Silently, she questioned her sanity over the monsters she had to conjure in her mind to bridge the loneliness.

Better to be lonely.

She clutched at her elbows, hugging herself, looking almost as sorry a creature as she felt. She walked on. The earth changed, a marble floor of once polished squares, black and white and black, appeared beneath the dust of her feet, then a gravel road, tarmac with the remainders of faded road markings, like chunks of human existence thrown around during an earthquake, or, more grandiosely, she thought, like the apocalypse of the human world had been thrown into a giant blender and spat out of the other end, into here, the gap between.

Half a Suzuki Vitara was lying on its end to Emmeline's right, it was a yellowish khaki colour, and reminded her vaguely of the cool four wheel drive her nursery teacher had driven in New Zealand.

It was a sudden and biting memory of a time so so long ago, but the vehicle wasn't the only piece of earthly shrapnel lining the path. There was a Grecian marble column, shattered into chunks, a power pylon twisted into a confusing heap of iron, a pile of fence posts tangled in barbed wire, a red telephone box up-ended and half buried in the nothingness, and a smashed up B52 warplane. And that was just within Emmeline's immediate vicinity.

There were smaller things too, strewn about. Coke cans, condom wrappers, cigarette butts, a faded purple summer hat with a wide straw brim, cocktail umbrellas of varying colours, pieces of brickwork and mosaics, a statue of Mary the mother of God with her pretty porcelain face cracked in two, a dried and disintegrating memorial bouquet that Emmeline guessed had once spelt the word GRANDMA, except the M and the A were missing, so it was just GRAND.
A moments pause, and Emmeline considered that it could also have been Grandpa, or Grandfather, and a flowering of salty tears began to eat away at the corners of her eyes as she remembered her own Grandfather's face the last time she had seen him, requesting a cup of tea to accompany his morning cigarette before she ran out the door to work. Such a silly, tiny, almost meaningless little memory, but it was all she had and it was the most important of all.

Overhead, the sky crackled, and wrinkled, and peeled backward before snapping into place once more, like a tent fly caught in a storm.

The noise brought Emmeline back from her requiem with a start.

A split of darkness and light, of nothing and everything all at once. It was the tear between this world and earth that wrinkled in the sky above her, and it filled her with fear.

Charon.

It was the first time she had thought his name, the first time she had dared to give it form in her mind, Charon was supposed to bring the opening and closing of the gap between worlds, making it as seamless as the open and close of a zipper.
But he wasn't here.