Apocalypse and Pretzels
[The first part of the story is provided by 
Early in the morning, in the bitey air of an unripe April, fine pearls of rain drew averted trajectories, trying to prolong their run towards the ground. The morning sunlight slipped through them, caressing their lopsided dances.
A freshly baked pretzel perfume mingled with the acrid, yet familiar note of wet tarmac. Similar to the inviting singing of a mermaid, that fragrant smelling trail traveled for blocks coming from who knows where, bringing the illusion of a tasty breakfast at hand.
On Madison, the sound of a distant pneumatic hammer, disinterested in that diaphanous moment of peace, reminded the city of its daily duties. The need to renew the infinite interweaving of order and chaos, the human sap of a monotonous and, at the same time, different becoming.
An old beggar was taking shelter from the drizzle under the entrance of the Met Breuer.
He seemed to come out of nowhere and, in a sense, gave the idea of having been there forever. The shabby headgear with ear-muffs could barely contain the explosion of white hair, gathered in damp, frayed cords due to the persistent drops of aerosol. The festive and bizarre trichological chaos reigning on his head only sharpened the contrast with the fixedness of his gaze, veiled by a cataract under the crusty eyelashes. Forearms and hands rested parallel, laying on a small and unusual pink plastic banquet that seemed to have been recovered from an abandoned nursery.
In front of him, carefully lying on the small pink table, he placed a typical cardboard square. Strangely enough, where a message of help was supposed to be found, not even a "everything helps" decorated the miserable panel which, laconic and brash together, was left naked to look at the sidewalk.
None of the hasty passers-by would have ever bothered to look down at the bizarre old man but, if someone had stopped for a while, perhaps he would have noticed that his open lips uttered a constant chant, a whisper of elusive and continuous vibrations.
"Now the distortion around him has become almost visible, how much do you think it could go on?". In truth, for several hours what had happened under the gray shed had captured the growing interest of two luminescent figures, on the other side of the road. From time to time, they exchanged positions to steal each other the best view. Their feet seemed to slip soft like fog on the cold sidewalk.
"Learn about silence once and for all, Duth. Would it make sense to even just hazard a guess in front of this.. thing?".
"But how is it possible for a human to perform the Chant, or to just gather.."
"And instead, if you bothered to listen, you would have noticed that this supposed human has just added the sixth voice," the archangel interrupted him, punctuating the words as he tried to separate red pomegranate grains from their peel.
"I think we've observed enough, we do not want him to start opening a seal, do we?", he continued, trying to resume his usually compassionate tone, "We have to report about it to Metatron. Stop stalling, let's move".
The old man's eyes suddenly gnawed them, like a blacksmith's hot pincer. Duth did not even have time to finish wondering how a simple homeless had been able to identify them on the subtle plane from which they were watching him.
An Auntie Anne's Pretzels van sped in the direction of East Harlem, sprinkling the city with its fragrant trail. For an instant, the driver seemed to have heard a curious song, but he didn't pay too much attention.
Photo by me
The New Song
[This is my ending of the story:]
The luminescent creatures floated, light as Chinese flying lanterns, across the road, entering the spaces between the darting cars as if they didn’t exist.
"We know you can see us” the one responding to the name of Duth said, as soon as they reached the pink plastic table.
The tramp, who had not suspended eye contact with the two creatures for even a second, as well as his subliminal song, raised his eyebrows imperceptibly.
"We should not talk to you, but what you are doing does not leave us time to comply with the Norm, and we are forced to intervene directly, warning you to stop the Chant," said the other. Not that his voice produced vibrations in the air like ordinary sounds, but it could be heard by the recipient in other ways, if that was the will of the issuer.
The homeless gave no sign of understanding, continuing to look at them with eyes that glistened with a waxy cerulean under the filthy palisade of his eyebrows, while he continued to emit the Chant.
Was it a slight smile of mockery, the one that stuck out in his beard?
If the two creatures could have manifested loss of patience, the next words would have been soaked in it.
"Are you deliberately endangering the Fabric of the Cosmos?"
"Who are you? Show yourself! "
No reply. No sign of an awareness that, however, was clear from the look. Was that man pretending to ignore them, or was he not entirely in control of himself? Was he really a man?
Duth, breaking at least six hundred paragraphs of the Norm, put a hand on his shoulder and conveyed the ethereal equivalent of a shake.
The fleaky cap slipped from the hairy bush and fell to the sidewalk. Between the locks, for a moment, a fluorescent snake appeared, that was climbing up from the wrapping rags, following the shaggy neck, until it plunged into a dirty ear.
Duth pulled the cable slightly, slipping off the earphone with a faint snap, that had the symbolic value of an explosion.
From the little, shower-shaped, piece of plastic, the Chant came out, faint but clear.
"I didn’t steal it! I found it! "The homeless exclaimed in a rasping voice, suddenly coming out of his trance.
Coiling like a hedgehog, he protected his treasure, an MP4 reader, from the hands of... indeed, whose? There was nobody on the sidewalk in front of him. Still, it seemed to him that there were two figures. The memory, however, was already fading from his mind, he could not bring it into focus.
This didn’t surprise him that much, it often happened to him. He sniffed, and began to think about what to write on that damned piece of cardboard to make the passers-by more merciful.
"I had to cancel the track, and now we're going to report to Metatron, hoping he'll forgive us for the infractions."
"We had no choice: the Seal would have been broken. Did you memorize the title? "
"There was only written Mendo. No reference to Known Powers. "
"Worrying…"
Two blocks away from Met Breuer, neither the infuriated taxi driver, nor the driver of Auntie's Anne Pretzels, nor the witnesses to the crash, realized the Sign traced by the braking on the asphalt.
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