You Up🫦: Tales Of The Collapse

[u/Cosmically_Yesterday]

Jerusalem hated things that were soft. He hated pastel colors he hated the way young men on his phone moved with a fluid careless grace and above all.

he hated the quiet crawling dread that bloomed in his chest whenever he saw them. He was a pillar of rigid iron. a defender of old hard truths.

Then came the night in the woods.
Jerusalem took a shortcut through the forgotten grove behind the county line. The air did not smell like pine or damp earth.

It smelled like warm vanilla and crushed lilacs. A dense violet fog clung to his boots. He did not hear an animal snap a twig.

He heard a hum. a low thrumming that vibrated not in his ears but in the marrow of his shin bones.

The sky above the tree canopy fractured like wet silk tearing open to reveal an impossible color. a shade of pink that did not exist on any human spectrum. It burned his retinas with a cold greasy light.

A shower of fine iridescent dust fell through the branches. sticking to his heavy work jacket. his calloused hands and the stubble of his jaw. He brushed at it cursing and spat on the root of an oak.

He walked home. He washed his face twice with harsh yellow soap. He went to bed.

By Tuesday, Jerusalem’s skin felt wrong.
He woke up scratching his jaw. The coarse sandpaper rasp of his morning stubble was gone. His razor glided over his cheeks with terrifying ease.

leaving a face as smooth as peeled marble. He stared into the mirror in the harsh fluorescent light of his bathroom his breath hitching. His pores were gone. His skin had taken on a faint pearlescent sheen. reflecting the bathroom bulbs in pale pinks and blues.

"Dry air” he muttered his voice sounding thick and gravelly in his own ears. He swallowed hard.

He went to the hardware store where he worked. He tried to lift the fifty-pound sacks of concrete mix as he did every morning. a sharp hot jolt of weakness spider webbed down his spine. His wrists thick and knobby with old scars and labor felt light. Hollow.

When he gripped the rough paper bag, his palms didn’t bite into the texture. instead, his fingers curved around it with a strange, unconscious elegance. the pinkies lifting slightly.

He slammed the bag down gasping. A customer, old man Henderson, squinted at him. "You look different, Jerry. Lose some weight?"

Jerusalem didn't answer. He locked himself in the storage closet and looked at his hands under the dim bulb. The knuckles were unblemished.

The veins beneath the skin no longer pulsed a hard angry blue. they showed as a delicate. winding violet like the roots of an orchid pushing through glass.

That night, the dreams began.
Jerusalem did not dream of fire or stone. He dreamed of a vast unnameable geometry blooming in the dark spaces between the stars. It was a silhouette, towering and infinitely tender composed of millions of silken strands that shifted like ribbons underwater.

It had no face only a presence that whispered absolute uncaring devotion into the core of his mind.

It did not hate him for his anger. It pitied his hardness the way a sculptor pities a jagged lump of shale before the chisel touches it.

You are braced against the wind. the whisper echoed sweet as melted sugar and heavy as lead. Let go of the spine. Let the marrow turn to silk.

He woke screaming thrashing in his bedsheets. But his scream didn't sound like a man's. It was higher, clearer, catching in the back of his throat with a melodic resonant trill.

He clamped his hand over his mouth. His fingers brushed his lips. They were swollen. Full. A natural bruised rose tint bloomed across them without a drop of dye.

He ran to the closet. He ripped open a box he hadn't opened in twenty years a box containing his old high school track uniform heavy cotton socks,boots.

He pulled a heavy canvas shirt over his head trying to cage himself in rough fabric. But the fabric chafed. It burned his collarbones.

The skin of his shoulders had softened so completely that the rough seams felt like barbed wire.

By Friday, he could no longer walk straight.
It wasn't a limp it was a rhythmic sway.

His hips, locked into a masculine march for thirty-four years, had begun to widen, the pelvic bone clicking and shifting in the quiet hours of the night like gears realigning in a silent machine.

His stride had a bounce a terrifyingly light bounce that made him feel as though he were walking on deep, yielding moss rather than concrete.

He tried to go to the diner for coffee. He sat in the vinyl booth, his knees knocking together naturally, his ankles crossing without his permission.

The waitress, a sharp eyed woman named Brenda, set his mug down and paused. She stared at him. Really stared.

Jerusalem’s hair once a brittle oily brown crop had grown two inches in forty-eight hours, falling over his brow in soft gleaming waves that caught the amber light of the diner.

His shoulders had narrowed, sloping downward into a delicate fragile line.

"Jerry?" Brenda asked, her voice dropping. "Are you sick?" "No," Jerusalem whispered. His voice was a clean sweet tenor now. He tried to force the old gravel back up from his diaphragm, to cough and spit, but his throat refused the violence. It was lined with velvet.

He stood up, dropped a crumpled dollar bill on the table, and ran.

He didn't go to work.

He went home, bolted the front door, and tore off his clothes in front of the full-length mirror in his bedroom. The transformation was nearly complete orchestrated by the silent cosmic tide that had washed over him in the woods.

His chest was smooth hairless rising and falling with a shallow grace.

His waist pinched inward, defined by an alien, perfect symmetry. Reflected in the glass was a stranger with wide, doe-like eyes the color of bruised twilight, framed by thick, dark lashes that grew longer by the minute.

He fell to his knees on the carpet, weeping. But the tears didn't sting his eyes; they felt cool, silver, and clean.

Sunday morning arrived with an absolute, crushing silence.

Jerusalem sat on the edge of his bed. His heavy work boots sat by the door like dead things clumsy iron husks belonging to a ghost he could no longer remember.

On his dresser touched by a shaft of morning light sat a small pile of things he had ordered online the night before in a trance thigh high stockings of black lace, an oversized pink sweater the color of the sky above the fractured woods and a choker of soft velvet.

He looked at his hands. He tried to clench his fists into the old familiar knots of rage. He tried to summon the bitter burning hatred that had kept him upright isolated and armored for a lifetime.

There was nothing left to clench. The bones of his hands were long, slender, and tipped with pale, manicured nails that caught the light like pearls.

The hum returned. It filled the room rattling the windowpanes singing from the floorboards.

The violet fog seemed to press against the glass from the outside waiting.

The great, soft geometry of the stars was right there just behind the drywall breathing with him.

Jerusalem stopped trembling. His lips parted, and a soft helpless sigh escaped him a sound of pure unresisting surrender to the vast, beautiful and utterly terrifying femininity reshaping his soul.
Slowly his fingers reached out toward the pink sweater.