Newborns of the Night

[SoaringIcarus]

This showed up one night, when I was thinking about books instead. I couldn't turn it away, it's been so long, and I wonder if it said everything it had to, or if it will return. Nobody who's read it liked it, except me, but parents always think their own children are special. Maybe it's not mine. I couldn't turn it away.

 

-Icarus

 

Daylife strikes 11pm and withers and twists into night. The fearful are sleeping and the weak are hiding. Motionless neverhood streets, thick with emptiness, are flooded only in blotches of gray lights, droning to themselves. Outside of the blotches is an uneasy movement; the kind of movement people think they see because of the flicker of the lights..

 

House lights of orange invite you to walk past, noting the homeyness, and keeping well on your path, stranger. The houses are armed to the teeth with dark-matter sensors anyway. It's easier now than it used to be, now that security comes cheaper. Still, they're only growing stronger, and daylight has never seemed so fleeting.

 

You look up to see precise periods ending celestial ideas. Commas sometimes. Elipses in Orion.

 

Nightlife has yawned it's first yawn of awakening and my mind feasts upon the places I shall go. It is finally quiet. The dead in the center of a storm. A storm ideal for the dead, that is... Not dead, but The Forgotten.

 

A black velvet invitation in perfect smooth calligraphy awaits my hand, inside a uniformly wrinkled envelope, bound in twisted dark ribbon. Mysteriously upright, outside of my door, now a portal into the Nightlife of insane things that writhe in shadows and music from the wind and cries of broken souls with no destination.

 

An invitation in through the scared dimension that is the night, around abstract things on a whole plane of emptiness and echoed unanswered questions. Enticing me. Shaken but assured cursive lingers on and above the page.

 

An invitation through the portal.

 

The Forgottens would eat me alive, should I even make it past the river. But with this invitation and time enough in the full moon, I may be able to escape. There may be time. The portal could close, and all would be lost, but by staying here I'm just a chicken whose collar bone they would snap, to make a wish. The mere memory of me would be devoured, and I should only writhe with them in soft shadows, forgetting myself, forgetting the daylight, and knowing only unbearable starving insomnia. Their eyes are squinted shut. They feel their way through darkness, not like blind men, but like eternal Feelers who could just as soon make their way through your childhood as they could across the street. Nobody knows what drives them.

 

Then again, nobody knows much from other human beings, since the age of the Great Shadow. We are all quaranteened and bedridden, enforced by eachother. Many have already gone mad with cabin fever, and it is hard to distinguish at sundown who has gone mad and who is a Forgotten. They will run amok, crying out to the empty pale sky, until silence reigns. They slip past a corner, around a building, and are not to be found.

 

The feeling that in the profound silence is one entity that posesses every inch beyond your window, your door, that merely standing within it should let insanity trickle in through your ears and eyes, and you're not sure if what you saw a hundred yards away was coming or going, you're not sure how many limbs it had, or if they were tentacles or what it was saying or screaming or pleading, or if it was lost, what if it was lost, could you run then. Could you run. If it were some small child neglected and forgotten by sundown could you run, clawing your way to your door to leave them eaten alive by the movement underneath the leaves, and on the other side of the lights; that kid was you. You made it by pure luck or pure conspiracy that you should survive while your friend was chewed into himself, the dark stuffs growing into him from under his fingernails, you ran.

 

You ran until someone jerked you violently through a door, you thought you were as good as dead anyway. Out of breath, bloody face, what did anything matter to you.

 

What does it matter now if you ran from that thing coming up the street, up over the slope, coming fast and strong, or desperate you don't know. Your house was empty with orange emanating from the door like a lamp knocked to the floor, as you looked back at it. You look at the thing, and then down at the invitation at your hand. Something old, something new you thought, and you mingled with the idea of being a Maverick of the night. Or, by the looks of the dark Forgotten that barreld towards you, it's pathetic one-night stand.

 

Your eyes narrowed as you shoved the letter in your pocket, while your other hand softly embraced the hilt of your pistol. The Forgotten only murmured sounds of mindless nightmares and emptiness as it approached. Would you run a fifteen year old memory re-emerged at the last crucial moment. No, you thought. The silence must be broken, and the soul-scavangers must be put to rest. With all of the ideas of the cosmos overhead, you were the only one who could save anything now. Your own mind; if it wasn't too late.

 

Tonight was a night too feared for sleep, and too mutated to run from.

 

Tonight was a night to live.

 

Edited by: SoaringIcarus at: 12/12/02 2:16:17 pm

Edited April 29, 2004 by Alaeha