…Duster…

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea..." Revelation 21:1, written in the Christian Bible

"Surely they think it to be far off, and We see it nigh: on the day when the heaven shall be as molten copper, and the mountains shall be as tufts of wool, and friend shall not ask of friend (though) they shall be made to see each other..." Sura 70:6-11, from the words of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him

"Repent one day before your death..." Avot 2:10, from the writings of the Talmud

They say that one day, some two centuries ago, the bombs fell. Perhaps for a moment, there was no dark side of the planet as us humans purged ourselves in a cleansing brilliance that lasted two hours. Two hours, one hundred and twenty minutes. In the wake of this nuclear holocaust was ash. Ashes and dust.

Humans should have disappeared that day. Because of our wickedness, our bent towards destruction, we should have been washed away in that nuclear flood. However, out of fate, bloody luck or some act of divine mercy, we found some semblance of salvation.

It came at a steep cost.

A whole planet set back beyond zero. A race that nearly destroyed itself in violence learned nothing but instead persisted in that violence. Blood once again splashed on the radioactive sands on the face of an earth permanently scarred, permanently changed from a global atomic blast.

And two hundred years later, nothing has changed. Blood still stains the ground and cries out for justice. The few good souls are persecuted, the wicked who live by the sword die by the sword but not soon enough, and life still remains a daily struggle. Hell touched earth for a moment and scorched it, the demons have been holding out here for two hundred years.

But perhaps there are still some angels out there. Somewhere.

Somewhere out there in this dust, the dust that clings to us, the dust that we all return to.

Their wings move to sweep through the endless grime, a world awash in filth that it dirties their wings and drive them mad and yet some endless tug of the divine causes them to numbly carry on. Perhaps with a beat of their wings they blow just a little bit off and find some tiny shard of a precious jewel and yet there is still so much of this grime, so much of this dust.

Somewhere out there, in the sand that blows in the wind, you'll see them, their wings trying to brush away the stains.

Dusters.