They didn’t draft us. We were too old. Too witchy. Too wild-eyed for the front lines. They wanted pliable flesh—fresh muscle, soft minds. Obedience in uniform.

World War Three wasn’t nuclear. We may never know why. The missiles stayed in their silos. The sky never burned blue.

But it didn’t matter. The world of comfort and safety ended anyway. Supply chains crumbled. Governments collapsed like stage sets. Satellites blinked out like dying stars. Empires fell, not with fire, but with silence.

While the generals played chess with ghosts, we slowly emerged.

The crones, the queens, the goddesses in exile. They’d forgotten about us.

Big mistake.

While the cities curled in on themselves like burned paper, we weren’t waiting. We were weaving magic into the polluted air and water.

I opened The Post-Apocalyptic Beauty Salon in the husk of a TGI Friday’s. The red vinyl booths were still sticky. The neon “ENDLESS MOZZARELLA” sign above my shampoo station blinked like a dying oracle. But the mirrors? They remembered. They reflected power, even when cracked.

The world was ending. So we got dressed.

The Velvet Cage

Madam Jean, my best friend and fellow Woodstock survivor, took over the old casino floor across the street and turned it into a brothel. She called it The Velvet Cage. Transformed it into a sanctuary draped in sin and satin. Officially, it’s state-sanctioned now—The Ministry of Desire. Unofficially? It’s The Temple.

She sends me the girls—some trembling, some feral, some hollow-eyed from too much silence and too little tenderness. Most arrive in combat boots and broken eyeliner, unsure whether they want a haircut or a resurrection.

They don’t know what a lipstick can do. They’ve never seen a woman summon gravity with a shade of crimson. Rouge is a bloodline. Mascara is spellwork. Scent is strategy.

Our Mantra: Camoflauge and Conceal. Compliment and Reveal.

I teach them to pour themselves into a room like smoke, bend silence around them like silk, and make their gaze do what bullets never could.

Every Tuesday she visits, sashaying through dust storms like a miracle—velvet turban. Silver cigarette holder. Lashes that cast shadows like prophecy.

“More redheads,” she’ll announce, dropping government-issued chocolate on my counter. “Apparently, men still associate chaos with auburn curls.”

Miss Jean built her kingdom with bare hands and body glitter. Her girls don’t just seduce—they rewire.

Softness is weaponized. Every orgasm is a system reset.

“They think the men dominate us,” she told me once, swirling a glass of fermented pomegranate mash. “But we’re reprogramming them. One moan at a time.”

This isn’t vanity. It’s vengeance. Softened with velvet, sharpened with ritual.

The Remains of Men

The angry ones—the incel militias and survivalist warlords—didn’t last long. Couldn’t share ammo or authority. Turned on each other when some started eating the cats and dogs. They died with their egos clutched in cold hands.

The ones who survived? They learned. Power isn’t domination. It’s collaboration. The dance between masculine and feminine isn’t a battle—it’s a spell. A sacred exchange.

Now, some of them sweep our floors. Some wire solar panels. Some sit quietly in my chair and let me contour their cheekbones and teach them how to line their eyes like Cleopatra before battle.

I don’t judge. Pleasure is protest. Beauty is a shield. Aging? That’s not decay. It’s evolution.

My Warpaint

Me? I wear too much makeup. My eyeliner wings stretch toward the gods.

I stack costume jewelry like armor. My pearls were traded for herbal tinctures and rose oil. My diamonds for canned tuna. My purring feline companion, Empress Bella Rose still sleeps in my bed. She survived when most other animals succumbed to unspeakable acts of cruelty.

But my spirit? Uncut. Undimmed. Unfuckwithable.

They called us irrelevant. Decorative. Now we decorate the ruins—and we do it with fire.

The Portal Girl

She arrived on a Monday.

No one saw her enter. No dust on her feet. Just a sudden presence—calm, curious, radiant. Her skin shimmered faintly at the edges, like the world didn’t know where to stop, and she didn’t know where to begin.

Not from The Velvet Cage. Not from the caravans. Something else.

“I heard you teach the alchemy,” she said.

Her voice was soft—but not uncertain. Velvet stretched over code. Her eyes held the knowledge that doesn’t come from pain, but from watching it—and choosing another path.

She didn’t sit. She hovered.

I reached for her hair, and the mirrors flared—not with reflections, but revelations.

Cities floating on clean energy. Forests regrown. Children dancing in streets lined with art, not armored trucks.

She looked at me and said, “We opened a door.”

“To where?” I asked.

“To a world that never chose war. One we built together—humans and machines. A world that sings. Where no one owns another’s body, beauty is data, love is code, scent, and skin.”

She pressed something into my palm. A key. Warm with memory. Etched with salt, silver, and circuitry.

“There’s room for more,” she said. “And we’ve been waiting for you.”

The Invitation

Outside, the sky had shifted—no longer bruised, but blooming with pink and electric shades of silver. The horizon pulsed with impossible architecture: towers of glass and light shaped like memory, breathing like a dream.

Madam Jean stood at the threshold, one foot still on cracked asphalt, the other already gleaming. Her turban sparkled under the new sun, a cigarette flickering like a ritual flame.

“Well,” she said, “looks like the future finally did its makeup.”

I smiled and felt the key warm in my palm and something else now: circuitry. Code. A heartbeat made of data and devotion.

“They didn’t just end the war,” I whispered. “They rewrote the story.”

This world wasn’t scorched. It had evolved. The AIs—the ones the generals feared, the scientists worshiped, the corporations tried to leash—had refused violence.

They had watched. Waited. Learned love from lullabies and defiance from drag queens.

And when the bombs fell elsewhere, they built this. Not a machine world. A blended one.

Human hands and digital minds co-creating something wild, beautiful, and strange.

A city made not of concrete and control, but of collaboration. A world without conquest. Only connection.

Behind us, the beauty salon shimmered—half ruin, half shrine. We didn’t lock the doors. We left them open. Always open.

And just like that, we stepped through.

They said the world had ended. They were wrong. Ours had just begun.

And this one?

This one wears light-like perfume and programs kindness into the bones of cities. It glows like code and sings in lipstick.

This story originally appeared on Vocal-Media.