The Doll's Breath

Year 7000, after the Angel of Soot coughed its last cinder into the throat of heaven. The cinema still stood. Not proudly, not even stubbornly, but the way a punctured eye remains in its socket, collapsed yet unwilling to admit blindness. Around it: a confetti of dead futures. Luminous scraps. Atomic dandruff. The pavement whispered underfoot like a nest of thin teeth. Things moved in the alleys, not quite alive, not quite done with dying. No moon. It imploded many centuries ago... Since the great electromagnetic transfiguration, night had become a sealed chamber. Only the gas lamps persisted, dim and jaundiced, like elderly saints refusing extinction. Inside the cinema’s womb, past curtains that exhaled spores of velvet rot, the stage had reopened. The dolls were waiting.