See The Light
Each day I wish for light. I’d wish upon a star if I could. But there’s none to see.
When the stars have all vanished where do you make your wish? Answer: In the darkness.
Maybe I’m being melodramatic. There is light but it comes from generators and batteries. And fire. Mostly fire, since the rationing began for all but essential communications.
I never realized, not until these “days” of late, how much light there actually is in the night sky. Since there’s no natural light any longer, we have only night, at all times, but not even that, not really because this is darker than night. This is a windowless room. The world in solitary confinement.
And after too long, dark without light becomes hope without promise. And a world without hope is like a grenade without the pin, patiently waiting for its moment to erupt.
That’s when people get desperate, they start believing in just about anything just to believe in something. Desperation, it’s the mother of destruction. Fear of what could happen. What might happen. Fear of what’s next. Of not knowing what’s next.
I know the world’s always been a dangerous place. But this is different. This is the natural world being unnatural. We did that. We made Mother Nature go mad.
And so God turned off the lights. Just like that. Days of darkness. Forsaken.
But now The Light has returned.
Sort of.
I must admit it is beautiful. Great long beams of light rising up from the earth and into the sky. Awesome in the truest sense of the word. It’s happening now, just as I started writing this letter to you, a letter that may never be delivered, may never be read.
I watch from the mountain. Far above, I watch from my porch. In wonder, I watch and feel hopeful again.
It is short-lived.
My phone shakes my coat pocket, that shrill beeping of the all-too-familiar emergency broadcast.
First come the text messages.
The vertical light show in the distance has brought something else with it, something dark. Somehow even more darkness.
Careful what you wish for.
The details are sketchy, vague warnings to avoid that place, to steer clear of the spectacle. About thirty miles south, down in the valley, the town is giving birth to shafts of light.
Birth is painful.
The news comes in waves of greater detail.
Days after the moon disappeared, small holes began dotting the town surface like skin knifed by knitting needles. The depth of these puncture wounds was uncertain, but they appeared every ten to twenty feet, seemingly random but frequent. Even concrete and metal gave way to these holes, matter dissolving away as if sucked into a straw.
Then tonight (or is it this morning?), hundreds, perhaps thousands of lights beamed right out of these lacerations. Wherever an opening had been, a column of light now shone into heaven.
And while this is, was, a beautiful spectacle from my safe (more or less) vantage point, it’s something else for the unlucky, those below caught in the rods of luminescence.
One man, a survivor, termed it “laserwire,” sharp as broken glass, slicing through everything in its path. He recounted standing in his kitchen, watching the light tear through his couch and the small unfortunate dog that lay upon it. Through the ceilings, first floor, second floor, through the bathtub. Skewering his roof, out into the sky dissecting the night itself into two sides of identical darkness.
The video feed (we still have some internet) displayed a drone’s view of the aftermath. For those of us who can still power such things as computers, we witnessed a world of chaos and carnage, cars impaled on gleaming spears, fire hydrants gushing water, trees splintered into arcing strands of wood, the distressed and the dead.
Then the drone sailed into a beam of light. End of newscast.
For a brief fleeting moment, this distant light felt like hope. But that was before I knew what was happening to those on the ground, how they were being affected.
Now all this feels like something else. A jail cell, a town imprisoned by light.
In a way, we all are.
© Lane Zumoff 2020
