The New Messenger (a Poisoned Iris short story)


It was just a picture and a few words painted in large letters on a building’s façade and signed “The She-Messenger.” Most people had probably ignored them. Maybe because they didn’t understand what was written—few people were able to read nowadays, whether it was English, the common language, or Greek. Or maybe they simply had more important things to do than ponder over the words of an idealist.

Something more important such as trying to survive in the hell that was Tartaros.

But Karl couldn’t ignore this woman’s work since he’d discovered the existence of two sentences: “Indifference and passivity are cancers that are spreading. Fight them before humanity is incurable.”

Given the content of this creation—the armed child, the devastated man holding ashes in his hands (possibly those of his house or someone of his family), and the famished-looking girl lost in a crowd disinterested in the fate of these people—the one who’d created this had surely done it well before the planet descended into chaos. She probably did it to denounce what was happening around the world and try to get a reaction out of at least one of Athens’ citizens or one of the many tourists coming from around the world to visit the cradle of civilization.

So The She-Messenger never had the Red Plague or the bloody war between the Infecteds, the Non-Infecteds, and the Soon-Infecteds in mind when she’d painted this. Yet this cry of distress was more than ever topical in this city filled with poverty, hatred, selfishness, violence, and death.

The woman hidden behind those words was certainly no longer alive, so she couldn’t try to raise awareness in Tartaros.

But Karl was there, and he was taking the helm.
Oh, he was a realist, of course. What he would do wasn’t much; maybe it would never touch anyone.

But if someone, just one person, got his message, then he’d have succeeded in his mission.

And after all, doing something was always better than doing nothing at all.

Standing on a roof facing the upper part of a building visible to all of the surrounding blocks, Karl stepped back a little to contemplate the huge painting he’d just finished.

With a sense of accomplishment, he put the finishing touches on his work by signing it with an “M” and an arrow-brush crossing the letter diagonally.

Today, The Messenger was born, and his first missive had just been delivered.