nighttongues

The day that the Great Letter in the Sky destroyed light was a Tuesday, and the destruction happened because it could. Too many things went in the wrong direction and the moon got too full of itself and people weren’t so pretty to look at anymore. So, the Letter shut off the lights. Stterag was in the shower when it happened.

“I paid the electric bill!” he yelled at the ceiling, where his landlord lived. “I’ve never been late!” He could hear them walking across the room, tripping over their dead grandma’s furniture, ignoring his fists hitting their floor. He was too busy struggling to notice the dark noticing him.

It stuck its fists into Stterag’s mouth and found nothing worth holding onto. Removed from his throat, it was satisfied to drape itself across his eyes and laugh at his soft, open palms. He stubbed his toes and banged his head on a hook in the dim and windowless bathroom. When Stterag opened the door and saw nothing, he closed it and opened it again. The lack of light laughed in his face and tripped him down the stairs and watched him fumble with the front door. Where an outside world should’ve been, there was only his own mind. The black hole behind the eyes spilled outwards and suffocated life. Every creature’s world had become a private desert.

Everyone wandered for a while with arms outstretched, Stterag in a nakedness that had lost its terror, feeling for familiar anchors and rope.

“That you?” Stterag’s neighbor asked every time he’d open his front door and smell for rain. “You hear anything? Are we doomed?”

They always came too close when they’d speak. He could smell their hands, dirty from overuse, and sense the desperation in their voice. It was claustrophobic. Bodies mixing in the dark bled their existence into his and he wanted it out. Stterag showered three times a day, in the blackness, until the water quit working and couldn’t be repaired. He’d smell for rain and cover himself in soap and silently transform into a puddle.

When people touched too many random objects and their faces and each other, it had obvious consequences. Limbs and lives got lost and their owners slipped behind another curtain. Stterag listened to the local children sing. Their parents soon caught on to the trend, and those parents’ friends learned, too. The darkness, still laughing, filled with the voices of toothy birds, lilting out to one another in hundreds of new languages. Stterag tried to copy a few. You learned to sing or you ended up alone. He sat in the bathtub of his flooding house, eating canned vegetables, attempting a melody, and wishing the water could carry the vessel away. At sea, there would be no stairs to fall down.

It would’ve been a Saturday when the Letter came back, though few had bothered to keep track. The Letter struck a match, threatened the moon with it, and she refused to apologize. Merciful as the Letter is, he lit the sun, anyway. He permitted LEDs and fluorescents and bioluminescence to ignite. The creatures he saw, he didn’t recognize. Selfish tongues slit their owners in circles and, even with the lights on, each only saw what was directly in front of them. Beautiful songs had abraded into terrible, guttural cackles. Nobody touched, their hands too calloused and worn to feel anything living. Stterag pressed his palms together in the bathtub.

“Please send me downstream. Send rain.”

Because no one else could speak, the Letter heard his prayer. He blew out the sun, again, and ate the artificial lights. He punched one hole in the landlord’s roof, one in their floor, and another in the sky. Rain fell through the darkness and combined with Stterag’s busted pipes and made an ocean of his house. Sensing he’d been set in motion, he floated through the nothingness. Creatures shrieked all around, some startled by the rain and the sudden shocks of light, but mostly because they feared loneliness.

Stterag voyaged on until he heard only wind, then some silence, then waves. He and his boat bobbed up and down until he could be sure that land was far behind. The rain stopped, at some point and, from that black pit at the center of the eye, one faint star was suspended. He kept his head entranced and towards the light, took a step out of the tub, and laughed at the dark as he fell down an absence of stairs.