It’s six o’clock. The sun slips from the sky. Twilight chases it over the horizon and nightfall is close on their heels. The day has been a dreary one, grey and implacably rainy. The coming darkness brings welcome change.
Street lights snap on, buzzing thick, orange, and hazy. They press upwards with the other lights of the city, trying to hold up the heavy bulk of the descending night sky. The darkness sags, touching the ground in the spaces between buildings and lamp posts.
Darkness has also crawled into my apartment. I hadn’t noticed it, eyes glued to the glow of my laptop screen. But my heart felt it. The mystery of darkness cloys about my arms and shoulders. The romance of darkness stirs me. I smile. My heart gets in a few extra beats every minute. In the cold light of day, everything is ordered and has its place. At night? We won’t admit it, but at night we can sometimes believe as we did when we were young. When the world was a more beautiful place.
My fingers, who pecked and hammered during the day, now dance upon the keys. The black of the letters on the screen come from my fingers and from my body, which pulls in the darkness around, drawing it down as through a funnel. The letters that lay dead upon the page in the light flicker and writhe in the dark.
Shapes of ash, and smoke, and mist rise and coalesce at my shoulders. They whisper in my ears. Burnt to cinders or banished to crypts beneath the earth by sunlight, they now return. Glancing around behind me, I shudder at their leering faces. And again I smile. The night is young, and lamplight has no power here.
In the darkness, something takes my hand. I grip tightly and follow into the black.
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