Skip to main content

Driving

 Driving in the dark, tired. Trying to remember something. Out into night beyond the road is endless, still fields. Tall shadows under a clear and moonless sky. The backbone of the Milky Way sprawls in glorious omnipresence, and I feel diminished beneath it, rightfully. Window cracked so I can smoke because Stacy hates getting in and smelling the signature Camel scent. Radio crackles to me in whispers— think it’s jazz. 


Driving. A straight road to the end of the horizon. A pre-Columbian vision where the world ends, drops off into the dark, and I can imagine so many castaways drifting as payment for their reckless exploration. Twist the dial for the radio, looking for WQ34-9, thinking they’ll say something about the game—


I blinked. Jolt. The road is dirt. Narrow. I’m in a field, surrounded by tall shadows. The radio hisses in long, droning notes like I’m listening to the sea crashing on the shore. Sitting in the dark. No wind. No stars. Fingers caked in ash from a stumped cigarette. Something ancient twitches inside me and makes me look skyward, pressing back into my seat, hand clawing for the glovebox, for the gun— 


The stars are going out. Darkness spreads. Silence. The radio hissing mixes with the rush of my blood until it’s all I can hear, all I can feel. Something above, something coming, shaking hand closing around cold metal, fumbling and grabbing, trying to pull— 


Light cuts the darkness. Bright, unnerving sunlight done in red. An ugly sunrise at midnight. I’m shaking. Sweating, drenched, pulling at the seatbelt, throwing the door open. Run, run, run— 


The red engulfs me. Numbness erupts, engulfs me. I can feel it looking down at me, looking into me, and the familiarity all comes back, the memories explode from hissing silence. Driving to run from the light, to hide. Hoping if I cross state lines I can retreat— 


D O   N O T   B E   A F R A I D


A chorus of voices. 


I’m surrounded. The red light dominates the sky and the darkness of the night fills countless, bottomless eyes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Necropolis

 It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space. There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.  And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.  Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.  It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.  The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lepidopterophobia

You are dying.  Doesn’t matter how.  Feels so far away now— doesn’t it?  That’s it. Take it easy. Let that last breath slip away, like the warmth that comes in a killing cold. Gentle into a silent night. No more looking up at those crowding, concerned faces; a herd of pale, pained moons.  - - - - - ___________ A dark tunnel. Familiar, but not. You’re welcome all the same. Hands groping, grasping against glassy coolness, stumbling—  Light.  The most perfect, pure sunlight. Every idealized summer, every perfect candlelight and warming fire, all that condescend sun-sure dances across a lifetime of days. It’s mere existence is the most pristine invitation. In illumination alone it says come closer . If you had a heartbeat it would be racing.  Up. Up. Forward. Scuffing, almost tripping. Surging forward, hands outstretched.  You’re here.  The Light. The Light   It’s so— wrong . It’s purity vanished, replaced with an organic and oily sheen. Lik...
Post a Comment
Read more