pluto on the descendant – Shuchi Agrawal

January 27, 2026

she points a gun at her unyielding lover and shoots. feels like a friend i have had far longer than i actually have. far longer than he had done, in fact.

no one else hears the shot. not a soul on this dark gravel road, soaking with blood like a coral reef.
when she does not put the smoking gun back down, i am so afraid that i want her taken away. as if it’s possible to have nothing to do with her. as if she’ll disappear forever once she’s out of sight. as if this full moon and all its creatures will swallow her, sweep her away like a dark tide once the sun is near again. and then, i will miss her howling, and be spared my own. like we’re both not already a sort of apparition, murmuring in the midnight wind.

i want the wind to whistle that she is my destiny. the way gods pronounce prophesies by cracking open the sky. this is not because i want her to be. i can’t possibly explain it.

have you ever faced an omen that only half-arrives? like edgar allan poe’s large black-eyed bird, the size of your torso, just staring wordlessly. speaking only through its black beady eyes. through its quiet insistence on staying. an omen itself is a riddle. like a dream you interpret with the help of a medium, or a skull with just enough life left in it to listen. then, the future unravels it all. tells you if you got it right, after all. but if a fortune cookie is abandoned midway, or a prophet loses their voice, what becomes of your half-knowing? what do you do with all the fragments of your reality?

we descend into the night, trying to forget what we know. with my once certain future suddenly obscured, i am drawing a blank, dreading the passage of every moment. time’s subtle movements feel hostile now, as they pull me inexorably from the expected tomorrows i’d worked hard to build to ones that lead up the stairs to the gallows’ edge.

in moments like these, i hate her quiet certainty. calm as the eye of the storm; a singularly upending force. she has placed a clock on my life. she who seems like she’s already forgotten what i spend all night and the nights after trying to forget.