Showroom Display on a Dying Planet

It was all set up just like real life. The faux-leather sectional and matching sofa sitting atop a synthetic fabric rug, its dizzying pattern zigzagging in pastel, resembled in its arrangement a version of a space that every person knows well. The cardboard wall segments, the computer-generated artwork framed in plastic, the fake Boston ferns hanging slack like the necks of drunkards, every object set a stage on the permanent act of an elusive Act I, the start of a forbidden performance never to lift its curtain. Every department store had one, but the one located in a dark corner of the second floor of Nyquenas Mall, in Olwyn’s opinion, was especially uncanny.
On a day like this, when the mall was empty, it was her favorite place to sit and waste away, tossing precious moments of youth to drown in a river of silent turmoil, knowing absolutely nothing about the world or—especially—her place in it, lying on the couch like in some abandoned living room on some dying planet, orbiting a dying star, lost in the cartography of her inner-geography, on a Tuesday afternoon.
That day, Olwyn wandered over to Nyquenas Mall, per usual, for no reason in particular, first to smoke one of the long cigarettes she’d swiped from her mother’s purse, in the shadow of The Anonymity, a misshapen statue of some lumpen humanoid with bad posture. The security guard, Carlos, would leave her unbothered so long as she performed her juvenile delinquency discreetly. Puffing away out of sight from the respectable shopping public, Olwyn found herself unable to lose herself truly as she loved to usually do, bothered by that ever-present sense of dread that had attached itself to her and everyone she knew, infecting, she felt especially, her network of private hostilities.
Lately, she couldn’t seem to get ahold of any of her loved ones. Family and friends made themselves sparse, burrowing like ghost crabs, hidden from the light of day. It was nice, at first, getting a break from some of them, not least of all her parents, whom she loved but secretly suspected of praying to themselves when they prayed to God.
Times like these, Olwyn could truly feel as if she was on that dying planet, circling that dying star, abandoned as punishment for some unspecified trespass. Except this time, the young woman took a look around and—she actually was on that dying planet, circling that dying star.
The ceiling vanished, revealing an unsolar sky, a daunting infinity, pierced vaguely by ever-distancing stars who looked down on our world in pity. Olwyn’s heart stopped—was it even there anymore? She expected death, prepared for a violent retreat into oblivion, her body succumbing to the total lack of atmosphere. And yet—she stood, alive, allowed to exist on the second floor of Nyquenas Mall, suddenly displaced beneath alien sky, re-staged as a phantasmagoria lightyears from the known world.
Things shifted. The furniture now appeared snatched from another era: gilt-wood settees, French two-seaters, an iron tête-à-tête with sharp stubble. The decorative wall art was replaced by floating cartouches etched with obscure details of some lost history, pictograms with meanings rendered urgent by their indecipherable nature.
Olwyn watched glowing purple finches fly alongside comb jelly and vampire squid, flashing rainbow-silver with light from chandeliers that levitated like spheres of illuminated pollen. It was a vivid scene, haunting, alive, like nothing she’d ever seen or experienced, the closest she could remember to feeling like she was both living and dying. Olwyn had not the faintest clue how or why she’d ended up here, but she never wanted to leave.
Right on cue, as the sound of baroque strings swelled in the distance, the mannequins commenced a dance number, wearing décolleté ball gowns, long-line bodices and tight-corseted waistlines containing graceful automatons, heads framed by sapphire diadems, bodies animated in order to act out the art of some wicked archon with a well-developed sense of aesthetics. Olwyn, the only human being as far as she could see, got a closer look weaving in and out of choreography while an alien symphony sang from a choir of phonographs. She almost lost herself completely. That’s when she looked up—and there she was.
Blanketing the heavens, the hyper-massive face of a goddess floated upside down, serene, her body that of a serpent coiled far out into meta-galactic space, ending in the fiery tip of some faraway star.
Instantly, Olwyn recognized the being: Echidne, mother of the Gorgons, among others, prismatic viper’s torso emanating the color spectrum ad infinitum, looking down on the young woman with the eyes of Olwyn’s mother. The comforting stillness of her familiar brow, arched slightly in her patented expression of reserved worry, in the form of an awesome, inhuman colossus.
Every fear, hope, dream, memory, every slight shift in Olwyn’s personal cosmology, recorded by her consciously or otherwise, over time, every passing moment of happiness, fragmented, flashed like slivers of filmstrip, and she could do nothing but stand completely still.
“I…I—”
“You don’t have to speak.”
“But I want to say something.”
She did? But what, exactly? Olwyn surprised even herself. She knew she had to speak up, desperately, to that matriarchal titan, up there crying tears of pink light. However much she tried, though, Olwyn simply could not find the words. Instead, she merely held her breath and disappeared.

——

The stony horror of judgement, secured in a handbag gifted to him by Hesperides. He dare not look into her face, not even her dead face, lest he make rubble of himself as well. But he could imagine.
Contorted, lovely, a landscape of stone runs in miniature, the head of an unearthly beauty, from another world but sent to ours in order to remind us of some vital fear, lost but deep-seated in an even more important truth. He loved her in a way he couldn’t really explain. Even her name enchanted, more so in death, he felt, as it uncurled and reached out like one of her head-serpents, pointing right at him. “Medousa.”
How could she not be beautiful? Damn the rumors. Slander, jealousy. At least she got old Polydectes good, one last vic for the old gal on her way out, en route, according to her cosmic origin and the terrifying power she wielded, to lie in rest, requiescat in pace, at the foot of Athena. His name, surely, would live on as legend, but the man himself would go to the grave regretting that he carried out what he’d been tasked to do: destroy the poor gal.
But Perseus would remember her as a beauty, not quite immortal, misunderstood, as the white horse upon which he flew, like the White Cross itself, momento mori, the Reaper. And dumb Polydectes, cemented like the lump he was, a nameless monument, a place for common birds to leave speckled shits, shadowing juvenile delinquents near the markets of Old Nyquenas.

———

Olwyn stood outside Nyquenas Mall, smoking beneath the shade of The Anonymity, avoiding eye contact with Carlos the security guard, adrift, per usual, on a Tuesday afternoon. That morning, she’d been unable to get ahold of any of her loved ones and was already forgetting why she even tried in the first place. She was happy to have those people in her life, even at a distance, so long as they orbited relatively close by, extending medusoid in all directions from the center of her being.
Things were never the same after her “journey.” She was grateful, whatever sent her over there, or brought over there to Olwyn, or had given her a peek, however brief, of something else, of something greater, of the world at which all perception merely hinted.
And so Olwyn wandered over to the showroom display, its furniture arranged to look like something out of real life, the waiting stage on that dying planet, orbiting that dying star, beneath the face of a serpent-goddess, a matriarchal leviathan, watching with her mother’s eyes the girl who cried the same tears of pink light, the young Medousa of Nyquenas.