Devil's Food/Angel's Cake

It was winter when your girlfriend broke up with you.

Five years, down the drain in a quick “I can’t do this anymore.” Five words more painful that a knife to the chest.

You thought you’d be able to get over here quickly—you had friends, family, a whole support system for you to rely on while you tried to pick up the pieces of your shattered life.

But what good is a support system? You just want her.

You’re drunk again for the umpteenth time this week. Your feet drag against the concrete with each step as if your body is using the last of its energy to push you forward. Your phone buzzes violently your pocket—no doubt calls and texts from your friends asking where you are at this ungodly hour—but unless one of those notifications is from her, you ignore them.

Snow drifts from the midnight sky, each tiny flake seeping into your skin and chilling your bones. You should’ve dressed warmer, especially on a night like this. Hell, you should’ve done a lot of things. Should’ve loved her better. Should’ve listened to her more. Should’ve been more attentive. Should’ve this, should’ve that. The list of your regrets goes on and on in biblical proportions.

You keep walking. Concrete sidewalks give way to mushy patches of grass, and the frequency of streetlights becomes less and less the further you go. The familiarity of the town you grew up in is gone, replaced by the gnarled silhouettes of bare trees. In spite of the cold, your body doesn’t shiver anymore. It can’t. All that’s left of your energy is used to push you forward through the growing pile of snow.

You only stop when the path ahead ends abruptly. When nothing but open air is there catch your next step. A blanket of white clouds your vision until it’s all that exists. No trees, no stones, no shadows, just pure white in every direction. In your drunken haze, you half-expect her to appear out of the white, to hold you against her chest and tell you that this was all just a test, which you passed with flying colors. You’d rest your chin against the hollow of her palm like you used to and she’d take you home and caress your neck until this nightmare disappeared forever.

You shut your eyes. You wait. And wait. And wait. Her touch never comes.

It’s too late to go back. You can’t even tell where back is. Back to your apartment, stained in the memories of waking up together? Back to the bar, where you’ll inevitably lose yourself at the bottom of another bottle? There is nowhere for you. There is nothing after her.

Your back hits the frozen ground as the last beats of your heart slowly decay into a dying rhythm. The snowstorm picks up, burying you with it. Your body, the one she had touched, loved, and broken, isn’t your own anymore. If you looked into a mirror, you’d think it was a stranger. A sad, lonely, drunken stranger. And that’s exactly how you’re going out.

It’s comforting, in a strange way—no more late nights letting your regrets rock you to sleep. No more crying over what could have been. No more staring at the empty spot where she used to read or growing sick at the scent of cherries. No more of anything,

That’s what death is, right? Just complete and utter nothingness.

As the cold envelops your body, that’s all you can think about—nothing. You embrace that nothing with open arms.

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After the nothingness swallowed you whole, you never imagined waking up again.

The first thing you notice is the temperature. It’s still cold, but after being buried under the snow, anything less feels like a sauna.

Every muscle in your body aches as you sit up, letting you know that, despite everything, you’re alive. Shit. Death was always a fickle thing. Maybe you could’ve jumped instead of simply laying down to die, but there was no guarantee there either.

The endless white that once surrounded is gone, replaced by the soulless grays of concrete walls and the rotting browns of cracked wooden floors. Harsh winds seeped through the cracks of the arched windows lining the walls. Wooden pews strewn about, brittle, forgotten. Nature had already claimed more than half of them, with some being nothing more than piles of decaying wood.

Behind you sits a large cross on top an elevated stage. Even as everything falls apart around it, the cross stays untouched. How poetic, you think. You were never particularly religious, but perhaps your survival would be a sign for change.

“You’re awake.”

Your gaze shoots to the center of the room where the voice came from. Where nothing once stood, now was someone. The first thing you noticed was her skin—pale and colorless, like the snow that raged on outside. Her hair, like raven’s feathers, as was her dress, something simple yet elegant.

“Who are you?” you manage to croak out. You instinctively clutch your throat. Every word feels like sandpaper against your larynx.

She doesn’t answer, just continues to stare with those pitch black eyes. There was no warmth in her expression. Or anywhere on her, for that matter. For a second, you wonder if the voice was even hers. Maybe you just imagined it and she was nothing but a statue.

Your quickly proven wrong as she approaches you.

Every logical part of you says you should be afraid—after passing out in a snowstorm, you wake up in this old, abandoned church to this strange and eerie woman—but you aren’t. All logic was abandoned the second you stepped into the woods.

She stops and kneels in front of you. A subtle chill emanates from her being.

“Did you mean to come here?”

“Where is here?

"Nowhere.” She rises from her spot and approaches the cross, each step echoing throughout the empty church. “It’s only temporary. Temporary requires no name.”

“Are you… temporary?” you ask.

She doesn’t answer.

Her slender fingers drag against the old wood of the cross. Something about her silhouette felt familiarly uncanny, like a stranger you’ve passed a thousand times without so much as a greeting.

Even in this decrepit place with this strange woman, you could feel no fear. You couldn’t feel much of anything, really. Perhaps the cold had numbed your spirit, weakening all sense of preservation. Whether you intended to or not, you came out here to end it all. Whatever the “end” looks like still eludes you.

“You will ask no more questions,” she turns to you, “and you will only speak to answer mine. Understood.” Her words come out with finality, like there’s no space for anything but the answer she expects.

A shiver runs through your skin as she stares at you, unblinking and unemotional. “Fine,” you submit.

“Why are you here.”

“Because…” Saying it out loud is more trouble than you thought. Because a girl dumped me. What a childish notion. And yet, it’s your truth. “…Because there’s nothing out there for me. Not anymore.”

“And you believe this to be true.”

“I… yes.”

She doesn’t speak for a while, simply pacing slowly across the stage. With each step, you feel the pain your chest continue to grow, the same pain that’s been lingering ever since you were tossed aside like trash. Like cancer, it seeped into every fiber of your being, infecting you from the inside until you were nothing but a husk of your former self. Your lungs, your bones, your brain, nothing was yours anymore.

“Why did you do it.”

Your gaze falls to the floor. “Do what?” you mutter.

“No questions,” she reiterates, eyeing you intensely.

On unsteady legs, you rise to your feet. “I was about to ask her to marry me,” you start, the pain in your chest like a knife twisting in your heart. “I had everything planned out. I bought a ring, I booked flights, I invited our friends to be part of it.

Your vision blurs, maybe from the burning pain or the tears, you’re not sure. Nonetheless, you continue. "She was everything to me. We promised we’d be in each other’s lives forever, but then she… she…”

“She left you.” She’s in front of you now, crossing all that space in an instant without a single noise. Despite the cloudiness, you could make out the obsidian of her eyes, like infinite blackness that lead to nothing. The woman’s pale skin seems almost translucent, but where you would expect veins and irregularities, there was nothing—hauntingly beautiful, like something you were never meant to see.

“She did,” you utter sadly. “All the time we spent, all the memories made, they all meant nothing to her. I meant nothing to her.”

You feel a gentle hand caress your cheek. Instinctively, you sink into the hollow of her palm, your eyes fluttering shut as the tears continue to fall.

“Are you nothing.” she asks.