When the sacrificials come through, the entire city shuts down, fireworks filling the night sky and music booming out from hastily set-up stages. The atmosphere is ecstatic, the way the tongue glories in the final meal before an execution. It’s Mardi Gras without the religious veneer. And you might as well join the party, because sacrificials can walk through walls and turn houses to smoke with a touch. For Madsen, the sacrificial parties are the worst part of urban living

Madsen would rather run. The first mention of sacrificials on socials, she gets on her scooter and goes. The vehicle is small enough to weave around traffic jams and roadblocks, able to make it to a motel or campground far enough away to be safe.

Except last night, Madsen stayed over with a new guy she’s dating. He asked her to switch off her phone, so they could really “be together” and she gave in, because it’d been a long time, and she was lonely, and didn’t want to fuck up whatever this was before it even started. When she woke, he was gone, no note, much less breakfast. She turned on her phone to the news trumpeting the sacrificials’ arrival.

The streets are already clogged with people. Her scooter, her only chance to escape, is across town.

Madsen hurries down Westheimer, weaving through the crowds of the dancing, the drunk, and the desperate. Broken glass glitters like diamonds. Sections of the sidewalk glow like rubies from the blood of those fallen from fights or drunkenness. The police have stripped off their uniforms because they aren’t needed. Their fear gives them away; brighter than most, it’s the fear they’ll come face to face with a sacrificial, be tapped with a calm finger and disinterested stare, and forced to reckon with being just another common citizen.

A snaking frat bro chain of revelers pushes an old man carrying groceries to the ground, smashed eggs and spilled milk spreading in a puddle beneath him. Madsen reaches down to help, but he turns to her with horror.

“Don’t touch me!” he yells.

Madsen recoils. A handful of the man’s face has been scooped out like clay, the tracks of individual fingers molded into what’s left. Pulling his leaking bag of groceries to his chest, he scuttles away through the crowd.

Half a block later, Madsen grabs a drink from a fold-out table and downs it in one go before grabbing another, the tall black man behind the makeshift bar waving away her attempt to pay.

“We’re all in this together,” he says, smiling a sad smile.

That second drink is already gone. A scream and she turns to see a woman ribboning into the air, a sacrificial spinning out the skin into the sky. The crowd tides away. Madsen runs.

* * *

Her hometown in Virginia almost destroyed itself when the sacrificials came through, people rioting after an entire pre-school class met a sacrificial on a day trip. Buildings were left to burn into ash. Urgent care centers locked their doors. After a week of terror, everyone acted as if nothing had happened. Madsen’s friends adopted their parents’ attitudes, changing the subject whenever she mentioned what had happened. Madsen couldn’t sleep for the nightmares. New buildings replaced the old like badly-sewn stitches. Those twenty children the sacrificial touched were rooted into the ground, heads pointed at the sky, screaming mouths frozen open. No one tended to them. Birds pecked at their eyes.

Politicians and priests say it’s bad luck to run. They say the sacrificials prevent famine, stop war, shield us from disease. For the good of everyone, some have to be sacrificed! And so, the government encourages these celebrations, funneling money in afterwards for recovery. They can’t do anything to stop it, so why not co-opt it, claim it was beneficial?

* * *

A street preacher looms atop a trashcan at the intersection of Westheimer and Hazard, his litany of sin and repentance occasionally interrupted with a thrown bottle or dixie cup of wine. Women on the edge of Empire Café’s roof toss water balloons into the crowd. One bursts near Madsen’s feet, the smell of vodka stinging her nose. She eagerly breathes it in. Every face around her is stretched into a smile under pupils dilated with drugs.

She understands the instinct, all this. What you can’t avoid, you might as well embrace. Look forward to. Pretend to enjoy. See as a blessing. Something meant to be. An inextricable part of your life. Formative, even.

Madsen understands it, but can’t embrace it. She needs to get home, get her scooter, get out. None of this needs to happen. Giving in to these infected humans, these fallen gods, these natural disasters made flesh. We don’t have to roll over and offer ourselves up as victims to a process those in power don’t understand and refuse to protect us from.

She forces her way through people in bathing suits doing shots only to find herself in a growing circle of quiet. The city’s frantic celebration rages on, but it’s muted here. Her heart pounds like she’s been sprinting for blocks, her breathing ragged and shallow. Scattered across the emptied street in front of her are just a handful of people. They shimmer like heat mirages. They move like dripping blood.

Sacrificials.

To Madsen’s right, a sacrificial man murmurs into a woman’s ear with the sound of an industrial vacuum and she won’t stop screaming, her skull expanding away from his lips. Across the street, a man’s legs unfold endlessly under an old woman’s fingers. Madsen steps back, but a solid wall of bodies blocks her, and now a sacrificial woman is in her face, eyes shrunk to potato pits, mouth open, mouth a night sky, mouth a constellation of broken teeth, and somewhere in there a north star Madsen is meant to follow.

It is too late to run.

The woman’s fingers circle her wrist.

The changes have already begun.

* * *

Ⓒ Andrew Kozma