LUMINESCENCE

 

He doesn’t know I’m watching him do it, but I’ve got a feeling that even if he did, he’d still do it.

 

He’s been staring at the light bulb for almost twenty minutes this time. Staring at it and talking to it.

 

Up close. So close that his lips are almost touching the surface of the bulb. I can see them blistering in the heat of the bulb, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

 

“It’s too late for this plane of reality, Mistress,” he says to the bulb. “It’s too late for anything here. It’s all refuse here, these people and their things and their three-dimensional way of thought. It’s all emptiness and what’s the point of trying to save them?”

 

Oh my God.

 

“I want back in, I want back in you,” he whispers to the bulb.

 

My camera-phone takes pretty respectable pictures. So far, there are several hundred pictures of this lunatic saved on my laptop. Sometimes these pictures serve as backgrounds for my laptop when I’m feeling unhinged. More often than not, though, they are simply pictures that I look at and ponder the meaning of on boring days.

 

I’ve been judging this man for weeks now, but the thought of staring at his image while he’s forever caught in the act of doing these bizarre things…the thought of that scares me a little. I mean, doesn’t that make me just as sick as he is?

 

Doesn’t it?

 

Now he’s got his right hand on the light bulb. Resting it there. His window is cracked and I can smell his flesh as it starts to singe like bacon in a cast-iron pan. My phone clicks and stores him away inside of a chip that I’ll pick at like an old scab later on.

 

The room he’s standing in is in complete disarray. Bed unmade, sheets stained orange by formless blotches. God only knows what that stuff is. Books everywhere, open and dog eared and ragged. Clothes all over the place, most of them ripped to shreds.

 

The man is naked before his light bulb Mistress. His body is lean, but well muscled. His buttocks are blue. His back is green. His legs and arms are black. Not brown. Black. Jet black.

 

He’s completely hairless. This shocks me a little each time I notice it, even though I've noticed it hundreds of times.

 

Now he’s kissing the bulb and doing a sort of wavering slow-motion salsa in front of it.

 

Is it me or has the room grown brighter in the time that I’ve watched him today?

 

“Tomorrow, my Mistress,” he says, as a tide of vomit rushes up my gullet. “Tomorrow, the woman outside the window will see this plane as it should be.”

 

I can’t help it. My stomach jumps and suddenly vomit is splattering across the cracked window and spilling down my front in a thick wave.

 

Darkness.

 

I don’t know how many days have passed, but I’m staring up into a bright nothing. An old wrinkled woman is stooped beside me, shouting gibberish and crying as loud as she’s able to. In a corner that isn’t really a corner at all, but more of a curve, a fat man screams and holds his hands over his eyes.

 

“I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t help staring at the sky! I couldn’t help letting my curiosity drive me blind!”

 

He staggers and falls to the…ground? Is that what it is, ground?

 

As I watch the man writhe and shudder on the ground, I notice that there isn’t a single shadow in the entirety of this place.

 

A booming voice speaks.

 

“It’s all refuse here, Mistress. It’s all useless and bent the wrong way here.”

 

I feel the need to vomit again and I’m suddenly crying, but these things don’t stop me from staring straight up into the source of the voice.

 

Through the blinding intensity and the non-shadow bend of the land, I see two gargantuan, lineless lips press against the sky.

 

“I want back in. I want back in you,” I hear as impossible lips open and close, over and over again against the dazzling firmament. “It’s too dark out here.”

 

The tide of bile and half-used food boils up from within and rockets over my tongue and across my lips, but even my vomit casts no shadow on the ground. I’m crying and now I’m screaming, but crying and vomiting and screaming aren’t turning my face away from the lips on the sky of the world.

 

I only want to stare and know what color is as I listen to the words 'I want back in, I want back in you' over and over again.

 

Reviews

[Dms]

Dude, this is the first thing I've read from you in about a year I think, and I was not dissapointed. You drew me in immediately with the whole guy talking to a light bulb thing. The details were sturring, and the twist at the end left me with that goosebumpy feeling I used to get at the end of a really good Twilight Zone.

[Hedra Helix]

i think this is really good too;) go hawksmoor.
oh, i yelled at the builders two days ago, lit a fire under someones a*s, its runnin now, i think we got a week and a half to go. get on that book.

[lark]

Holy cow.

This is awesome.

[Wisconsin]

Wow. Definitely reminds me of something Lovecraft would write.
But you make no mention of Cthulhu or the elder gods, so I like it a lot.
Kept my attention all the way to the end, which is somewhat unusual for me here.
I'm not very good at reviews, so I'll leave it at that.

[Vlazuvius]

Damn. I just read that it's a sign of bad writing to use a noun as a verb (i.e. "greats", "notables", ect.), but that story was Lovecraftian. Except that it also has a certain....well, sometimes I'm really self concious of my writing, but I mean it as a compliment when I say your writing reminds me of mine, in the way that you unflinchingly tell things that at first compell the reader to say "Man, that's fucked up", but then the unsettling fact creeps in that really, that's how things are. Damn.