The Somerville Light
Originally posted here at my Patreon.
I started working on my third (!) novel in November of 2012, during NaNoWriMo. Naturally it went the way of my other novels: I wrote about 30,000 words, then stalled out. (In the case of the first one, it was 100,000 words. It’s a complete draft; nobody but me will ever lay eyes on it. Oh, I suppose me and poor Chris Tilghman, who had to read the damn thing for my first class in Emerson’s MFA program, Writing the First Novel.)
I picked this one up again after letting it lie fallow for a few years. I was told recently that Kurt Vonnegut used to start things and abandon them all the time; he didn’t think that you had to keep hammering at something if you were bored by it. Sometimes he’d come back to something. Sometimes he’d write Slaughterhouse 5.
I’m not saying I’m Vonnegut or anything, but I’ve decided to stop beating myself up for liking to start things, but not liking to finish them. I think if I keep starting things I’ll find something worth finishing. I think that if I don’t keep starting things, then I’ll definitely never finish anything.
For now, though, I’m still excited about this thing I started years ago now, and I think that’s a good sign. I’m going to keep on messing with it for a bit, and if I’m lucky, soon I’ll have a book. For right now, the book is called The Somerville Light.
Here, have an introduction.
It was close to midnight when Sean got off his shift. The hospital was far from quiet at that hour; it was Sunday night, and though things weren’t nearly as busy as they were on the Friday and Saturday party nights, some people — especially the die-hards — liked to stretch the party as far as they could. When he walked out one of the side entrances, he could see the EMTs pulling up and wheeling the latest crop of drunk drivers, OD cases, and substance-related injuries into the ED. (Yes, he knew everyone outside of health care called it the ‘ER,’ whatever. He was happy and somewhat self-satisfied with his knowledge of the correct terminology.) He knew that later still there would be at least one suicide attempt, a couple of burn victims who’d fallen asleep with lit cigarettes, a handful of homeless people with miscellaneous, invented complaints looking for a place to sleep, and a few medical mysteries who somehow suddenly feel violently ill when faced with the prospect of returning to their miserable jobs the next day.
Breathing in deeply, then out in an enormous sigh, Sean pulled a pack of cloves and his lighter from his pocket and lit one up, stopping under a street light to flick open the silver Zippo, monogrammed with his initials and a pink triangle, that his best friend Mark had given him. “A memento,” Mark had said, “of our time together, as sterile and full of sisterly love as only a couple of old queens can be.” This was on Sean’s 35th birthday, three years ago now; old queen, indeed. Still, he cherished it, and smiled now, thinking of Mark, as he pulled the flame to him through the thin, precious black paper tube of tobacco and sanity. The rich, cloying scent of cloves surrounded him, and everything grew a touch sharper.
The street was quiet; this stretch of Highland Ave. wasn’t particularly rowdy at this hour on a Sunday. The dark surrounded him; it suited him, this part of his day, the peace of walking home alone. Nobody tended to bother him, fag or not: this was West Somerville, haven of freaks, and anyway he was a grown-up bear, not some poor young twink ripe for a beating. He tended to pass these streets toward his home without incident.
Which was a relief, after the day he’d had. He breathed out again, and the smoke mingled with the steam of his breath. It’d freeze tonight, probably. He looked back and forth before stepping into the crosswalk at Lowell St. Nothing.
When he stepped into the crosswalk was when he saw it. There — right under the yellow awning of the Yummy Hut. Something had flashed…not flashed, but sort of slowly pulsed. He stared toward the spot he was sure he’d seen it, but there was nothing. He jumped as a pickup truck started to ease through the just-changed traffic light; he’d been caught standing in the middle of the crosswalk. He jogged the rest of the way across, ignoring the muffled shouts from the pickup; engaging such people never did any good, and anyway, he’d been the one caught staring in the street. Guy probably thought he was an escaped patient, standing there in scrubs with his mouth open. Sean smiled again, at himself, and the street was quiet.
But there!
Farther off, down Lowell…another pulse, something golden-yellow. Glowing figures. Sean suddenly remembered something that girl had said…the drag queen who wasn’t a drag queen, Petunia, that was it. Jesus. She’d seen glowing figures in the road.
He was clearly just overtired. He took his patients’ complaints home with him all the time: headaches, nausea. He would dream about them, their problems, their families. Sometimes he’d dream he’d died in the night, and he would come in the next day and find the patient had passed. It was like a minor case of psychicness. Or psychosis, whatever you want to call it. He tried not to take himself too seriously.
There, again, though. What the hell was that? Farther away now, down the street he had to walk to get home. No harm in following it, he guessed. Though he wasn’t at all sure why he guessed that. Maybe he’d just seen enough real danger, real thugs, real people who wanted to do him harm, or his friends harm; maybe he’d seen enough people torn up by car accidents, bike accidents, muggings, assaults, rapes, domestic disputes. These flashes merely fascinated him; they didn’t frighten him. He’d lived long enough to have a good sense of what was going to hurt him, and what he could withstand.
He turned up Lowell and began the short walk to his street, keeping his eyes sharp, scanning ahead of him for any further sign of the phenomenon. His cigarette slowly burned down in his mouth as he walked; he barely bothered to smoke it. After a couple of blocks, he thought he must have just been seeing things. He rubbed his eyes, realizing he’d had them pinned open for a few minutes. When he opened them again, another flash was just ending, fading to nothing at the corner of Lowell and Albion, where he was headed.
Now his heart started to pound. Maybe he was afraid, after all. Maybe he was following someone who was deliberately signaling him, wanting to lure him to someplace where he could bash him. He stopped walking, staring at the last spot he’d seen the light.
“What do you want?” he called out, feeling a little ridiculous, but unwilling to go any further toward the sinister mystery.
Nothing happened for a few moments, but then he saw it again: the glow, longer this time, and more distinct. It stayed there long enough that Sean saw a shape, almost a human shape, in the light. Then it was gone again.
He could hear his breath, sped up and ragged. He pulled the cigarette impatiently from his lips, then thought better of it, took one last long drag, then threw it on the ground, stepping out the last remnants. “Who are you?” he called out again.
A trail of golden light, like the tail of a comet or a shooting star, slipped down the street toward the playground and the house, across the street from it, where Sean lived. Whatever this was, it was heading for his house. Did it know where he lived? Probably a good idea to follow and find out.
He walked slowly, carefully, not really wanting to catch up. He turned left at Albion, walking toward his place. The houses along here were quiet; the studios closed up for the night. A dog barked in a house he passed and Sean jumped. Stupid, he thought, stupid, stupid, just trying to keep calm. He reached the blue-floored basketball courts and saw it again: the flash, like the bulb of an old-fashioned camera, flaring bright then dying slowly back. Beyond the basketball courts, in the playground itself.
Did it think he was following it?
Well he was, wasn’t he. Maybe it wasn’t something to be afraid of at all. Maybe it was afraid of him.
“Hello?” he called. “Um. I won’t hurt you. You can come out.”
Flash. A tail slipping away toward the swings.
Sean crept up, looking around him from time to time to see if anyone else was seeing this. Nobody on the street.
Some part of him kept saying, quietly, insistently: don’t go any further. But he felt drawn forward, his feet seeming to move of their own accord. He had to get closer to that light. He had to know.
In the night playground, the slide shone in the wan streetlight; the jungle gym spidered in the darkness. The swings, black rubber straps dangling from chains, swayed back and forth gently, as though someone had just left them. Sean moved forward, going to the swings.
When he had been a child, he and his friend Kendra would swing on the swings for as long as their parents or teachers would let them. Back and forth, higher and higher. Competitive swingsets. When they were seven, growing up next door to each other in Winter Hill, they would swing until Sean was sure he’d go flying over the crossbar, upside-down like the roller-coasters they were still too small to go on at Six Flags; until Kendra shouted that she was going to fly off and end up in space, until they both shouted that they had to keep going, and get their swings to swing in exactly opposite arcs, and then the power of that would make them shift to another world.
Sean touched the swing chains, remembering, his mind focused only on the memory, only on the swings and the light and the strange power that kept drawing him forward. He saw the flash again, so much closer now: just at the edge of the sandy patch where the swingset stood. In the light were figures: two, three? It was hard to tell. A face. Maybe. Something beautiful, something wonderful.
Had anyone been standing on Albion Street, watching, they would have seen the flash, a shimmer and a fade, and by its light, a bald, round-bodied man in scrubs, lowering himself slowly, as if in a trance, onto a child’s swing.
Had they stood there a little longer, they would have seen the flash again, faster, and with motion this time, a thing like a comet’s tail or a shooting star, brightening the whole playground for a moment, then disappearing into the evening’s quiet.
A moment’s further examination would reveal that the man, too, had disappeared.
If you liked this, please consider supporting my Patreon. At the moment I charge by the substantial piece, and you can help me with as little as $1. Thanks!
