The Song of the End of the World
Read the original in Portuguese here.
I dreamed of red skies tonight.
In my dream, the streets were flooded with salt water. Tiny waves covered my feet and they reflected the redness of the sky. Around me, the world was water as far as the eye could see.
The sun had fallen somewhere beyond the horizon, prostrate. It had abandoned us but shafts of its light occasionally illuminated parts of the sky.
It was a city.
The buildings had crumbled under their own weights and toppled forward, dripping water and shards of glass from its windows. A ship had been carried to the top of a skyscraper. No one knew how. No one cared.
There were more people on the cars in the street than inside the buildings. You couldn’t hear voices or horns or the sounds of the engines. The wheels spun in silence over the water. The horizon had been swallowed along with the roads, but they still drove.
Among the cars there was a preacher with a bible in his hands. He yelled so loud and for so long that he coughed blood. I got closer to him, so close that I could extend my arm and touch him, and I couldn’t hear a single word from his mouth.
Around us, the lamp posts and the outdoors glowered at the road. Someone had been dragged by three others wearing green and yellow. There was a rope around her neck, but she didn’t scream or struggled.
The landscape was beautiful on fire. The buildings all twisting among themselves like they had been turned inside out. I was trapped inside of a machine, and the machine was bleeding to death.
Inside the wreckages, mother clutched their children, alone, and ripped their hair out by the handfuls. An entire generation did not have the opportunity of surviving their second year of life.
A dark wind blew.
I walked the city looking for something. In a dead end, I found the last generation that would live here.
A group of people danced together to deafening music. They had masks on their face and were all alone. They had not built the streets or the buildings; they were born in a world covered by water. Their skies had always been red, and they danced and danced. Around them there floated corpses; blood coming from their mouths and white powder from their nose. One of them looked like me.
I grabbed the closest person and said “Kiss me, I love you. These are the last days.” In my dream, I did not know the meaning of these words.
She kept dancing. All of them would keep dancing until the water would also swallow them. Until the sun went out. Those were the Witnesses.
I stepped away from them and put my hands in my pockets, but I felt them as wet as my feet. I looked, and they were covered in blood.
I wake up from my dream. The clock tells me it’s morning still. I open my window just in time to see the sunrise.
Today, it is red.