At first, we felt the slow rumble beneath us. Buildings ruptured and fell to rubble as we fled to the temple. Deep within the catacombs, the great stone altar holds the painting. Immense. Threatening: ‘Escha’. Nay sayers and profiteers said it was a thing of myth, but the famed art has awoken. Its work beginning. A sleeper-thick frame struggles to hold its magnificence, its burning judgement straining at its confinement. We did not heed its warning then, and now we watch as the four horsemen rear in jubilation. The knowing cower, the ignorant tremble, but none can look away as paint blisters and melts from the canvas to reveal Escha as was foretold.

Eyes meld to the fiery scene. We each know our guilt. We have called to this smoking flood through myriad cavalier acts, each one callous and self-serving. All contrition dwarfed by the vastness of our erring. This beauteous horror of retribution has been invited; we have insisted this painting of prophesy be fulfilled. All will witness its glorious malevolence.

A great wave of glowing cinders, rising from a sea of lava, rolls out of the canvas towards us. Red skies stained with clouds blackened by ash, twist in agonised convulsions. Fretting, they spit arcs of scarlet fire across a liquifying firmament. Hearts frenzy as the smouldering wave gains momentum.

The heat blows its menace from the canvas, blasting our skins like the blistered paint. We watch our sins, our ignorance, all our wanton denials, ride high on the wave’s crest, charred and melting grotesquely back into the tarry spume. The mighty frame heaves and pulses with the weight of the surging wave, swelling with its burden. It can be held no longer: erupting, the frame jettisons burning shards, spearing outwards as if splintered matchwood. Still, we cannot look away, still we cannot move from the vision. We face our last.

Sobs singe on breaths holding prayers, voices are dirges of anguish and remorse. The wave spews forth as the canvas succumbs, plunging smoking onto the ground. Our outstretched arms and desperate pleas smelt in the furnace wind. Our dust joins the multitude of ashen motes aloft in the searing air. And it is done.

…

Pam Knapp lives in the UK’s rolling countryside of the Sussex Downs, close enough to London to feel the heat, far enough away to avoid being burnt. Optimism is her greatest asset. Her most recent writing can be found in Dreich Magazine, Green Ink Poetry, Owl Hollow Press, Vocivia and Pure Slush