Shine On

The room was complete, black, sticky darkness. There was not a tangible piece of light anywhere save the stark bluish-green of the clock radio and the tiny dim red of the smoke detector.

Draynor’s palms were all sweat and confusion.|

Something was not right.

Peeling back the covers the room was tense, stuffy. The air was laced with humidity, and the legs of his boxers were tangled in wetness.

When he had gone to bed the night before, Draynor had pulled the vertical blinds down until they clicked on the windowsill. Then he’d drawn back the sliding cloth curtains to the center of each windowpane. Though his apartment was three floors above the community pool, every night he could still see the reflection of tumbling, watery light and hear the voices of lustful teenagers and swirling hot tub vibrations.

But this morning, he heard nothing outside except for a slight, static hum – echoing and meaningless.
The clock read two thirty-three, and Draynor assumed it was a restless stomach that had awakened him.
But the squelching heat felt more like midday than midnight.

And the light next to the pm symbol was lit.

Draynor suddenly wasn’t tired anymore.

His silvery watch read two thirty-five, but it also showed afternoon, not morning.

Draynor drug himself to the window, his limbs numb with a long sleep, and pulled back the blue cotton curtains in one sliding thrust. There was still no light, not even between the slats of the vertical blinds.
Quickly and nervously, for things seemed even stranger now, he gripped the pull-rope of the blinds and yanked them up.

He could feel the dust fly off of the thin plastic, but still, no light. Instead, Draynor was facing a solid mass of total darkness. He squinted through the glass but could make out nothing more than emptiness, nothingness, the feeling of being totally and completely lost.

There were no stars, no moon, no horizon, no trees, and no buildings.

Nothing.

And all at once, “am” versus “pm” seemed to count for very little.

Draynor stepped back from the window in a rush, closed his eyes tightly, and took a deep breath. And when he went back to the window, the view was the same. Nothingness.
Panic was beginning to set in, so he did what he could. He sought to make the unreal actual. Change magic to reality.

He struggled against the window for a good minute or two before he realized that the flip latches were still locked. He snapped each one up and then slid the window open expecting a rush of fresh air. In its place he felt nothing, like opening into one closet from another. There wasn’t any clean air.

Again he took a breath, but this time no step backwards. He did what seemed normal at this point, wrenching the screen into the room and stretching his hand out into the darkness.

His fingers crumpled against something solid before going even two or three inches. It felt like cement, solid and cold. It raised the hair on the back of Draynor’s neck.

The darkness was deceptive because it was not out in the distance. What had looked to Draynor’s eyes like a pitch-black landscape was nothing more than a solid dark mass completely blocking and covering his window. He felt up and down its space, feeling the smooth texture from top to bottom and right to left.
The darkness covering the window didn’t budge even the tiniest bit with Draynor’s most straining effort.
Claustrophobia was growing like an infant in Draynor’s gut.

Running to the front room windows, he tore the curtains off their rods and saw the same darkness living there. And it was only a matter of thirty seconds before he had discovered every window in the apartment was similarly tangled in thick, bizarre coverings.

Draynor hit the lights, each one in succession, around and around the apartment. And with each added light there was more black, more coverings, and the details showed nothing but smooth, instant black.

There was only one exit point left: the front door.

And this was how Draynor was beginning to think of it, in terms of where he could get out into the open space, beyond his living quarters, back into reality.

His brain was contracting with the confined space.

And a deadbolt later Draynor was staring at something that his mind simply could not comprehend. It was as if he had been buried in a landslide of blackened cement. The solid mass barricaded the entire doorway and was seamed with what looked like a weld of stone to wood.

No way out.

No way out.

He kicked and pushed and clawed at the obstruction but it showed no signs of his persistence. It remained immovable and incomprehensible.

Draynor made a second round to each window only to find them still sealed beyond any of his powers.

He turned on the TV, hoping for answers, but was greeted with static instead.

The radio was likewise a mass of noisy but meaningless static.

Draynor was frightened. As though he was in a dream. Pinched himself. Imagined going back into a sleeping body.

Nothing worked.

He sat with dull sigh onto the well-worn couch and placed a fist underneath his chin. The thinker.