If any of you are wondering what I do when I can't sleep at night... I write. This particular short story I wrote at 1am. It's different from most of the stories I've written before, and takes place in an urban setting and has a more dystopian feel. It depicts the ending of the world, when angels fall from the sky. It's not quite finished, so it's current working title is Beautiful Endings. I think it's a really unique story, so I hope you enjoy!
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Beautiful Endings
A Short Story by Kelsey Gatis
I never thought about how the world would end. It never even crossed my mind. I was sixteen, the age where I thought I’d never die. There were people who used to predict the end of the world. Prophets, poets—everyone, really. Some people said the world would end in fire, or in war, or because of the climate. My mother said that the world would end in disease.
It ended with beautiful flying men.
Astrologists said it was an asteroid, one too small to even notice when it struck, but of course, everyone had to film it. The asteroid landed in the dense forest of British Columbia, as predicted. Except it wasn’t an asteroid.
I lived five hours away from where he landed. My mother and I watched the broadcast on the news, sitting on the old sofa in our living room that fateful Monday afternoon. The police were called in first. Cameramen positioned around the forest captured footage of federals bordering the scene with yellow caution tape. Trees bent at awkward angles, away from the form of a man—almost a boy—naked and curled up on the ground. It was hard to see him clearly.
People in hazmat suits approached the man. A healthy distance away, police pointed their guns at the fallen form. The headline at the bottom of the screen read: asteroid landed in southern British Columbia appears to be human.
Slowly, the hazmat people lifted the boy up. He looked flawless for someone who had just fallen out of the sky. Glowing, almost. Of course, they blurred out his genitalia on camera, but no one seemed to be looking there anyway.
The cameras cut out suddenly as the boy steadied himself on his feet. Attached to his back were two massive wings. White feathered wings, like those seen on porcelain angels in church. One was bent at an awkward angle, bloody, with broken feathers. Red blood pooled from the joint.
He looked like an angel.
All at once, the world was quiet. My mother and I didn’t say anything to each other for a long time. How could we? What was there to say? My mind scoured for logical answers, as did the rest of the world. He was a terrorist. He was fake. It was a prank. He was an alien.
Tuesday came, and headlines spread. I woke up to flashing television screens and news reports: angel lands in Canada. People were divided into two groups: the people who thought he was here to save us and those who thought this was the beginning of the end. Everyone debated if this meant that God was real—if God was who we thought He was.
They held him in American custody, somewhere discreet. Everyone got regular news updates on their phones. Wednesday night, they announced they would do testing on the angel. Because, yes, that was what we were calling him now.
A woman, someone in charge of security with a long title I can’t remember, spoke on the television about how they were questioning him—determining what he was and if his story was true. That again, no one should panic. It was hard to believe her when she looked so scared. I wondered if she had seen the angel herself.
Immediately, debate sparked. Officials told us repeatedly not to panic, but word continued to spread. Some people wanted to treat him like an experiment, held in a science lab where they’d poke and prod him with needles. Others tried to give him rights; there were rallies in the streets for it. The more fearful ones said we should kill him before he caused trouble, while the righteous wanted to give him a nice place to live where he was safe, like some sort of zoo animal. No one wanted to give him power. He was a threat more than anything else, and we feared him. Whether we admitted it or not, we had believed that humans were the most superior creature. But we were wrong. The angels were. It made us feel small, and we didn’t like it.
“They’re all being ridiculous,” my mom said to me. We sat across from each other at the dinner table, half-heartedly eating roasted vegetables.
I looked up at her. “Why do you think so?”
“It’s quite clear to me that he will do whatever he wants, regardless of what we think.”
Friday evening, the government finally showed us footage of the angel in an interrogation room. Everything was made of steel, and the boy was chained down to the chair. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, far more attractive than any male supermodel or Brad Pitt I had ever seen. He was shirtless, probably because there wasn’t a shirt in the world that would fit over his massive wings. I was glad to see that the broken one had been patched up, although blood stained the white bandages wrapped across his back. He was big—not fat, but had a bigger body. His hands were twice the size of a grown human’s. He was two feet taller than a tall man.
When he spoke, he didn’t speak English. Some people could understand him; others could not. Everyone heard something different. I didn’t understand him, but I think my mother did. She used to listen to recordings of him on the television, rewinding the clips over and over again.
“What is he saying, mom?” I asked one day.
She never told me.
It took the angel four days to speak so that everyone could hear. When he finally did speak like a human, it was to one of the guards working in whatever government facility was holding him. His words were shared with all the world officials first. It was a week before they finally told the public what he said. It was gruelling to withstand, especially for the people who hadn’t been able to hear him at all, like me.
That was when the riots started—scared people desperate for information became dangerous. World leaders were attacked in the streets. Buildings were burned down. Posters and graffiti littered the streets. On the apartment building across from my house, someone spray-painted the words, “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” No one bothered to paint over it.
When my mother saw it, her face went pale. She claimed she felt ill after that.
I think that was what the angel had said to her.
My mom didn’t let me watch the news or listen to the radio anymore. She took away my phone, laptop, and television. She tried to keep me from knowing what he said, but eventually, we all found out.
The first thing the angel had asked for was a glass of water, which I thought was funny, all things considered.
The second thing he said was that he didn’t come here to end the world, but more angels would come, and he couldn’t tell us what they intended. Whatever happened would be the will of a higher power we would never understand.
Whether or not the angel had intended to end the world, his arrival started what I would come to know as the apocalypse. Things started to get progressively worse the two weeks after he spoke. New information was released to the public that even my mother, despite her efforts, couldn’t hide from me. People made propaganda signs and hung them on walls. Civilian houses were bombed. Posters of the angel with either the words “free me,” “kill him,” or something else along those lines, were written in red. People who weren’t religious before suddenly were and wore silver cross necklaces everywhere they went. People who had always been religious were scared.
He told us his name was Gabriel.
I stopped going to school after that. A lot of people did. I was in my third year of high school, not close enough to graduating that I was committed. My mother was a nurse, and she worked all the time. I didn’t have siblings; my father had left long ago. I can’t even remember his name.
One of the days I was home alone, I decided to walk my dog. I was restless. There was a forest behind my house, a thick one filled with leafy green trees and pines. In the forest, there were two different paths. One led to a calm, wide river down the hill. The other brought you deeper into the woods.
The trees used to scare me when I was little—how they swayed and groaned like they were alive. Or rather, like something was trapped inside them trying to get out. I always walked down to the river, but that day, I chose the other path. I don't know why.
A few minutes into the walk, something felt wrong. Suddenly, there weren’t any shadows, but the sun shone no differently. The air was perfumed with flowers, but I couldn’t see any. My dog tugged on the leash, and I obliged him. He led me to something like a hole in the ground. Trees bent at awkward angles, reaching away from the spot. A metal object shone in the light, sparkling at me, practically twinkling. My dog, Sunny, stopped walking. Bile rose in my throat.
No one had ever said that the day the angel fell, something fell with him. But it made sense to me—it certainly looked like it had fallen from space. I lived five hours away from where the angel fell, but I supposed an object could have landed anywhere if the angel had dropped it while falling through the atmosphere.
Before me was a silver trumpet.
I had never been religious. I had never thought about higher powers, and my mother never made me practice such things. My grandmother took me to church once or twice, and I remembered something about seven trumpets sounded by seven angels, signalling the end of the world.
I don’t know why, but I grabbed the trumpet. Maybe to hide it so that it couldn’t be sounded? I don’t know. Perhaps it already had been. Sunny whined at me. The object was frigid in my hands but much lighter than I had anticipated. It was still in perfect shape.
I tucked the trumpet inside of my jacket, hiding it there from anyone who was watching. I emerged out of the forest, Sunny tugging desperately on the leash.
There was shouting as soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk. The air was filled with smoke from a fire not far away. People ran past me. They threw glass bottles onto the ground, and I jerked back as one exploded in front of me. Sunny whined.
“It’s okay,” I mumbled, voice shaky. I lifted him off the ground, holding him close against my chest. More running now.
I knew what this was. I had seen them on the news.
It was a riot.
Suddenly, I was shaking. The way back to my house was blocked with people fighting each other and cars trying to get by. People were fleeing.
“Amelia!” a man shouted out.
I immediately whipped around to face down the street, where a red truck tried to push through the crowd. It was Mr. Erikson, my next-door neighbour. He was the same age as my mom—mid-forties—with greying hair and a clean face. He had lived beside us for fourteen years. I used to go to his family BBQs.
“Amelia, get in the car!” he shouted, rolling down his window to gesture me over.
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I ran towards him, Sunny bouncing in my arms. Mr. Erikson pushed open the passenger door for me, and I clambered in, placing Sunny in my lap. I closed the door.
“Thank you,” was the first thing I thought to say. My heart slammed against the trumpet pressed against my chest.
He didn’t smile. “Where’s your mom?”
“At the hospital.” When he flashed me a horrified look, I clarified, “Working, I mean. She’s a nurse.”
Relief pooled over his features. “Yes, of course. I knew that.” His fist pounded against the car horn, startling people into moving out of his way. “Do you want me to take you home? Do you need to call someone? I have my phone—”
“Just take me home, please. My mom will be back soon.”
“Do you want me to stay with you until she does?”
Before I could answer, my eyes were drawn out of his window. A wave of people suddenly ran towards us. No—they were running away from something. I lowered myself to see what was happening.
The apartment building with all the graffiti had been painted over. Instead of the biblical words being there, someone had spray-painted a giant picture of Gabriel the angel. His vivid blue eyes pinned me from across the street. My breathing stopped.
“Drive faster,” I hissed.
“JUSTICE!” someone screamed out.
The apartment building burst into a ball of light and broken glass. The entire car swayed with the force. Mr. Erikson swore for the first time that I had ever heard him. Even in the truck, heat burned into us. Flames rolled out the windows of the building through thick black clouds of smoke. Debris rained down onto the people on the street in front of us. They were cradling themselves on the ground, their heads covered with their arms.
“They blew it up,” I mumbled. Gabriel was gone now. Replacing him was a big gaping hole.
Mr. Erikson turned to me. “Drive home, okay? I’m going to make sure everyone is alright.”
“Wait—” I started, but never had the chance to finish. He jumped out of the car, rushing to the people huddled in the street. I couldn’t catch my breath. Why was this happening? Why were people doing this?
He left the keys in the ignition. Trembling, I slid into the driver’s seat and put my foot on the gas. People were getting up now. I watched as Mr. Erikson lifted a man with blood running down his forehead.
It took me twenty minutes to get back home, which normally would have been a five-minute walk. When I finally got home, the first thing I did was hide the trumpet.
That night, my mom decided that we had to leave our house. And Sunny. She said it was no longer safe in the big city of Vancouver. There were too many riots. She decided that we would drive the eleven hours to the small town where she grew up, where everyone was religious and old. Some town called Howarth.
We gave Sunny to Mr. Erikson when we left. He was sad to see us go, and my mother offered him a place in our car out of town, but he declined. He said Vancouver would always be his home, no matter what happened. I was almost glad because that meant Sunny would have a good place to live since we couldn’t take him in the car. He didn’t like drives, nor could we fit all of his pet supplies in the car.
We gave Mr. Erikson the keys to our house and began the trip to Howarth that night, when the roads would be quieter. I managed to bring the trumpet with me, hidden in the bottom of my suitcase.
It turned out to be a 16-hour drive before we finally arrived. There had been a lot of traffic on the highways, cars going in both directions, people running anywhere they thought was safer.
Howarth was indeed small. Small streets. Small houses. Few people. Lots of churches. One around every corner, it seemed. Compared to Vancouver, it was much quieter here. Elderly and young couples held each other’s hands while they walked down the streets. There was no traffic.
After the troubling weeks we had endured, it was a breath of fresh air. Here, it seemed, there was still some calm in the world.
The house my mother brought me to was small, with only one bedroom and bathroom. She used a key hidden under the doormat to open it. Both of her parents had died years ago, so I had no idea whose house it was.
She answered my question before I even asked it. “It was your dad’s a few years ago. I’m not surprised to find it empty.”
As soon as we entered the door, we stepped into the kitchen. It was drafty and run-down. Peeling green paint covered the walls, the hardwood floors creaking under my feet. Most of the windows had been boarded up, leaving only trickles of sunlight to permeate the room. It stank of mould. A few cans of food remained in the otherwise empty cupboards, and when I turned on the tap, cold brown water came out. But at least the utilities still worked.
“Do you know where he is now?” I asked after a few minutes of silence, as we both took revenue of the house.
“Dead, I hope. Look, honey—the television works!”
I sat at the dinner table with my mother, eating flavourless vegetables and under-seasoned meat. She had a thing against salt (something about the damages of having high sodium). I could tell she was stressed by the lines on her face that seemed to deepen.
That would have seemed like a good moment to mention the trumpet, but I kept my mouth shut. Sitting at that table in the quiet, without any alarms or people screaming in the background, I didn’t want to say anything to remind us of the terror happening outside. Or perhaps I was afraid things would worsen if people knew what I had found—what Gabriel had brought.
I should have told her. I should have told her about the trumpet.
That would be the last night I spent with my mother. The following morning, the angels came for what I had stolen.
And that's where Beautiful Endings comes to an end. Depending on how I feel about this story a few days from now, I may or may not write a part two to conclude it. Otherwise, I'm sorry for leaving you all with a cliff-hanger. This isn't my usual style of writing, but I thought this way of telling the story was really unique, and my main character just kinda spoke for herself (I'm debating whether or not to change it into a diary entry format to make the passive-style voice more functional). I also thought the plot had an interesting concept, and although this is just a rough draft, I wanted to share its potential with you.
Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this story, keep an eye out for any potential updates! I love hearing your opinions, so don't be afraid to reach out to me and share your thoughts about it.
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