Black Snow

It was a sentence of caution retold by countless people; one that brought slight gasps to the attentive children listening to it.

"Drugs, they're bad for you. So never ever take a whiff, let alone a taste," said a primary school teacher to her class. Some took heed, while others succumbed. Time changes people, and unfortunately, it also dulls their memories; it was like they never chorused, "Yes teacher!" upon hearing her last word slip out of her tongue.

Perhaps he'd let his sense of adventure get the better of him a couple of years ago, and he had his first taste anyway. Whilst he let the initial high lift him up, he wondered how something so wrong can feel so right, like fluffy pillows laced with poison caressing his skin; he'd die happy in his sleep just to feel like that forever. The night was young as he danced his way to the heaven those shiny white gates promised him.

All good things had to end, and as the incredible sensation ebbed away from his soul, he desperately clawed at it, begging for its very essence once more. Reality was just too unreal to live in any longer, for heaven was just a pill away. As he stumbled into the alleyway in the dead of night, he trudged on, convinced that the angel he was meeting would lead him back into paradise, away from the hell he was suffering in.

Weekly stumbles for the light turned into weakened but desperate crawls; he needed it and it needed him. Far too often would he wake up screaming as paradise faded and hell awaited him; but something strange happened as the days passed; heaven became greyer. Those magical white clouds slowly but surely began to lose the glow that had once kept him enthralled. It was like a carousel that had broken down, and as its joyous music faded into the distance, he got up and attempted to regain what was left of his sanity.

Heaven was empty, so empty. The angels that brought him there were nowhere to be seen. Wind blew from all directions, caressing his skin once more, but the eerie chill only brought shivers down his spine. He ran round the premise looking for an exit, but all he saw were the same shiny white gates encircling what was then revealed as a prison for the damned; there was never meant to be an exit. He rattled the gates in frustration and agony, but they never budged. A brief reflection on the main gate gave his face away. Haggard, pale and sickly, he didn't look like a person basking in the radiant rays of heaven, but an enslaved prisoner of the fiery depths of hell.

Sensing defeat, the man laid down and waited for darkness to overcome him.

He took one last painful look at his surroundings, only to find that the once cotton-like clouds and glittery white gates..

were all painted black.