[I. WHEN SAINT ELMO CAME TO CALL]
Like those who came before them, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher did not anticipate death when they stepped onto the elevator.
It was just beginning to rain—little rivulets of mist condensing against the sides of buildings like tears. The clouds merged and folded, forming one swirling mass of thick gray that choked the sun and set the sounds of cannonfire rippling through the air.
Mary Jane was ten floors above them, fingers straining to reach an E-flat. Mr. Gibson with his Coke-bottle glasses and red beard was standing behind her, tapping the page with a baton meant for an orchestra and not for a girl with her hair in braids, shoes barely reaching the tips of the pedals.
She was a Prodigy; four feet tall and gap-toothed.
The elevator rumbled its way upward, slowly. It was a beautiful elevator, all things considered—a turquoise-colored metal box, with glass diamonds set in the walls. It was the Westbrook School For Music's pride and joy, a symbol of art and particularly heavy funding. Light jazz music was playing from a radio set in the ceiling. Mr. Fletcher checked his watch. Mrs. Fletcher, meanwhile, looked at her reflection in the keypad; a moist finger running along the outline of her lips, brushing away smudged red.
The cable above their heads grew weaker; a great band of wires slowly decaying until there were five, four.
Mary Jane turned the page and looked at the clock. Four fifty-eight. Two minutes until her parents would step off the elevator and free her from the windowless room with naught but two grand pianos and a madman.
Three.
Mr. Fletcher hummed a song—a ditty he had learned as a boy; something folksy and simple.
Two.
The elevator shifted to the left.
Mary Jane startled as thunder shook the building. Mr. Gibson set her hands back on the keys and pointed to measure thirty-six. There were two accidentals in measure thirty-six—two flats.
"Play!" Mr. Gibson's brows were furrowed, twin caterpillars merged together. "Play with feeling!"
One.
The foundations gave a little shudder. There was a great flash of white and a smash—of breaking glass, of breaking bones.
Mary Jane sat in the dark with her fingers folded across her lap.
[II. THE APOSTLE'S CREED]
Hassan al-Faruq was a very bitter man.
He was also Mary Jane's best friend. He brought her breadrolls and magazines and chocolate milk, and sat on piano benches beside her when he was on break. They were waiting for her parents to come collect her from piano lessons.
"I know it'll be today," Mary Jane said, smiling.
It was always today. It had been today for six years.
Hassan pushed open the window. It was damp and humid outside, the whole world soggy with vapor. A pretty red bird was warbling a sort of reveille from its perch in the tree, mocking him. He sneered at it and it flew away.
He sighed. "We'll see."
"I just know it."
They sat there, Hassan contemplating the utter shittiness of life, Mary Jane swinging her legs. Her stockings were getting too small, he noticed. They barely reached her knees and left angry purple lines where her legs had grown too big for them.
"I'm on Stall Duty," he said. "Do you want to help me?"
Taking care of demented orphans was not written in his job description. Scraping away the sins of drunken little boys in suits and ties was, however. This was something that Mary Jane was very happy to do, most of the time, so long as they wrote her parents a note, in case they came back and couldn't find her. It made him feel bad, to sit there watching her giddily scratching snowflakes into bathroom stalls with a razorblade, but it kept her smiling. The best he could do was smoke and pray to Allah for forgiveness for his laziness.
The way things had been, he wasn't entirely certain there was an Allah. Fresh out of grad school and he was back, cleaning up vomit, looking after Mary Jane.
She gave him something to love, he thought in increasingly common moments of sappy introspection—the vomit was unresponsive.
He brought his toolkit into the mens' restroom and pointed out several sketches: teeth, eyes, genitalia, fag in letters three inches tall. Mary Jane opened it and knelt next to each one, lovingly sloughing away the nauseating yellow paint they had used to cover the turquoise, after the accident.
It was a different building, almost, but for a sickening black scar down the center, like some enhanced Hollywood debutante. Beautiful and new, but with surgery scars running where no one could see them.
Hassan left her alone and took a packet of cigarettes with him to the Abyss—a deep pit with that same yellow color coloring up rotted boards, shielding wandering eyes from what lie beneath.
A crumpled jewel box and two bodies, ten floors down.
Mary Jane had never made the connection. It had never occurred to her that her parents had never come to pick her up because they were waiting at the bottom of the Abyss, rotting.
Hassan carefully stuck the end of his cigarette into the hole. It illuminated a pinprick—shiny, blackened walls with small flecks of that turquoise.
When the lightning had struck, it had gone straight through. It had heated the outside of the box like some kind of sick microwave.
Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher had toasted.
It was an awful thought.
Hassan shook his head and took the last few remaining drags before going back into the bathroom to check on Mary Jane's progress.
She was still kneeling, bare knees against the tile, but her razorblade was not scraping away. Her shoulders were trembling.
"Hassan," she said. "This one says the world will end next Wednesday."
Hassan squatted next to her and squinted. Someone had written in silver Sharpie:
Fire and brimstone, sinners, repent!
Those final hours of your life hath spent
Making evil with thy hands of blood
Thy intentions thick and black as mud.
A comet will strike this Wednesday coming
While the chords of sin are loudly humming
Prepare, for the coming of Jehovah is true
And his plans of vengeance set to brew.
Sincerely, The Apostle.
It was one of the more juvenile apocalyptic predictions Hassan had seen in his janitorial career. Amateur, practically. The ones by the English majors were the best, usually, in iambic pentameter and cursive with flourish.
"Don't worry about it."
"But it says—"
"Just some stupid kid."
She looked up at him, smile wavering. "I'm going to go see if they've come yet."
