Belief in singularities assumed many versions, read ironically in straight lines of symbolic text. Maud weighed the blank tablet in her hands. This conversation may have interested any countless scholars, epistemologists, cosmographers, metaphysicians, and poets, but Maud had little interest. She did, just barely, recall a lecture from her angelic training. A power point on the circumference of Phaestis’ eyes, the absolute and unmoving circles Aristotle first studied as an infant in his mother’s arms. Maud also thought that they were stunning, but she could never stand to read The Art of Rhetoric.
Eyes made no room for irony.
During Maud’s Academy Days, Fortune kept her schedule on a tight wheel. She still ate lunch at an allotted space in the breakroom, and she occasionally found some nostalgia at the breakroom microwave, missing simpler time. A small, commercialized act of ritualistic sacrifice, the Microwave spins its alter in the light of heaven for thirty, astrologically profound seconds in this space-black frame.
Maud let the light go out and grabbed her lunch.
Betty walked in, surveyed the cabinets for a coffee filter, and proceeded to make a fresh pot. Grace redefined itself against Betty’s careful walk. Maud barely admitted to herself the glances that she stole of Betty at the office. If Betty noticed, she didn’t act like she cared. Her demeanor stepped lightly on the minds of those around her. She rarely settled long enough to grow offense at how others behaved. This moment had been different. Betty turned around, percolation steaming behind her, and caught Maud’s gaze. Maud wanted to fill the silence with some type of talk but didn’t.
Neither did Betty. Their eyes, so used to monitors and screens and lightning souls, rested for a while in each other. When the coffee maker finally sputtered and quit, Betty filled a mug and gently walked past Maud, leaning over just long enough to kiss her, over the shoulder and on the cheek.
“Memories,” Satan said. “They flash before you at the end.”
Memory was fluid, though intangible. Strong souls have been known to remember past lives as newborns, before language begins its little acts of erasure. Education actively forgets the pasts of individual selves.
“Do you have a plan, Maud?”
Maud choked.
Satan laughed as a breeze.
“That tinge of disappointment, it’s the realization, isn’t it? That Albion isn’t coming back? Now you’ve arrived at the end, Maud. You can have the last word if you want it, but you’ll have to decide whether you will face or turn your back to the coming dissolution of being.”
Maud could feel it. Working for Albion made time feel meaningless. Suddenly, she was dizzy. Her mind turned inward.
“Finally,” mused Satan.
Maud considered the last soul she greeted and welcomed into existence. The beauty of thought. Faith in thinking. Curiosity and wonder.
“I think,” Maud said, “that trees are lonelier in paintings.”
Satan puzzled.
“I think that memories stack like ceramic plates on timeless angels.
The edges of leaves wrinkled up into ash, warming their lines of sight.
Satan dried up and lost the last few leaves, which swirled into watercolor focus where the face of an angel revealed itself. The eyes were dark and sad. The lips full. Satan’s expression begged Maud to share this final choice with them. Join me, he invited her as she stood between him and the end of everything. The end doesn’t need to be lonely.
Rather, Maud turned and stared down emptiness.
Maud’s singular thought revolved around a coffee scented kiss. The heat of her breath modulated to a gracious whisper. The web of thought around her, every spinning mode within this great lung of time, black in spastic bursts. The microwave closed. At her smallest, brightest size, the sight of Betty’s neckline was clearest. Once time flattened out completely, Maud scanned this moment like a water bug in some forest puddle. The part where Betty’s lips touch her skin gave Maud goosebumps even here. The buildup, correlating this experience to human terms, would sound like she was spending 2,000 years in the breath cut short by Betty’s forward glance. The kiss itself was a flash, but Maud spent a millennium or two in revery of the aftermath. There was nothing else. Only this one thing.
Left alone, Satan understood what Maud created. She had catalyzed cosmic residue by focusing her energies on a singularity of her own. Time was gone. The highs of life were registered, those moments when humans admitted that their life could resonate in eternity set watermarks for love’s reoccurrence. Maud made sure that, in whatever breath followed this break, that every little girl would always know a friend who made her heart feel proud and full.