Love, Death, Industrial - Black Halo Bride

 

I can’t remember when the city stopped feeling alive. Maybe it never was.

Smoke covered the sky  and sat over the rooftops day and night. Sirens went off so often that people barely looked up anymore. Beneath the streets, the machines kept turning, chewing through coal, steel, hours, bodies, whatever we fed them.

I worked down there.

Most nights I came home smelling of hot metal, with black dust beneath my nails and a ringing in my ears that never completely went away.

Then I met her.

She was standing beneath a broken streetlamp, singing in the rain as if she had every right to be heard. No stage. No microphone. Just that voice cutting through the generators and traffic.

People stopped. Only for a few minutes, but they stopped.

So did I.

She didn’t rescue me. I don’t think either of us believed in being rescued. She simply reminded me that there was still something inside me besides work, anger and exhaustion.

We married without asking anybody.

There was no priest, no licence and no family gathered around pretending to approve. I bent a strip of copper wire around her finger. She laughed because it was crooked, then kissed me before I could try to fix it.

Smoke drifted behind her head like a dark halo.

My black halo bride.

We made a life wherever the city left us alone: boiler rooms after midnight, abandoned train platforms, narrow streets where the cameras had stopped working. We loved each other carelessly because careful people plan for a future, and neither of us had ever been promised one.

Then came the frost.

That was what people called it. Nobody knew exactly what it was. A sickness, a leak from one of the plants, something released deliberately and denied afterward. It travelled through vents and cables and under locked doors.

It found her lungs.

The officials arrived wearing clean white coats and masks without expressions. They would not answer my questions. They sealed the room, took her away and told me to wait.

I waited.

Then they told me she was dead.

Her body was buried beyond the rusted sea gates, close enough to the water that the salt ate away at the names on the stones. I was given a number, a document and several instructions about how grief was supposed to proceed.

I ignored all of them.

I went to her grave every night. Sometimes I spoke to her. Sometimes I sat there without saying a word. The city tried to erase her one storm at a time, but I kept watch.

The first mark I painted across my face wasn’t meant to be a smile. It followed the shape of something that had split open inside me - a wound.

Jon Grinmaster was born beside that grave.

I just didn’t know his name yet.

Sincerely yours, 

Jon Grinmaster