Terminal Sunset

What future is there for mankind on a haunted Earth, orbiting a black sun?

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“I miss when ‘night people’ meant insomniacs” Mom called out from the kitchen, elbow deep in dirty dishes. I smirked, but Dad either didn’t hear it or wasn’t in the mood, peering tensely through the blinds. When I knelt beside him, I discovered the object of his interest was a silhouetted figure standing across the street in the alley, just beyond the reach of the street lights.

“Do you think that’s one of ‘em?” I whispered to him. He squinted, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. “I dunno. It kind of looks like Donovan, but I just saw him on the way out of the office an hour ago. He even told me not to “get got” on the way home, he’s not the careless type.” So indeed, either it was one of them, or somebody with a death wish.

Mom continued to prattle on about things she missed, the way boomers do. The way I guess everybody starts doing the microsecond after they turn thirty. In her case, longing for a world which never existed outside of Norman Rockwell paintings. “I miss when gas was a dollar” she’d say. “I miss smoking on airplanes”. Or “I miss the sun”.

To be fair, I miss the sun too. That’s a good deal less controversial than some of the other things boomers miss, and something I’m old enough to have faint, fond memories of. In the earliest memory I have about it, the sun was coming in through the partially opened curtains as I laid in my crib. Shadows from the mobile overhead played upon the far wall, fascinating my developing little brain.

It felt so perfect yet surreal that sometimes I wonder if I dreamt it. Early childhood memories have that quality. Whenever I overhear seniors at school talking about it, they make it sound like the blackout was no big deal. Covid only reinforced our impression that fucked up shit was now the order of the day, so we knew to expect more lockdowns.

Kids are resilient. The night world became their new normal after the first year. Their parents, not so much. Predictably there was a contingent of society convinced that the sun was being blocked by a swarm of micro satellites funded by George Soros, Bill Gates and so on. That the sun’s actually fine, and the precautionary measures were all about increasing government control.

They were the first to get got, disappearing into then plentiful unlit alleys, service tunnels and derelict buildings with GoPros strapped to their bodies, streaming to “alternative news” platforms. That was the public’s first glimpse of what happens when an NP takes you.

Takedown notices got the videos yanked, but the Streisand effect ensured they would still be available on the darkweb until all the other stars have also gone dark. Then again, maybe they have. We’d keep seeing the light still in transit for millions of years.

In every vid, the same thing happens. They talk a big game about how they’re standing in darkness and nothing’s happening. Then at some point they see someone they know, usually standing motionless in a corner or doorway. In the videos where they shine a flashlight on the figure, it becomes briefly invisible while the light’s on it, fading back to solidity when it’s not.

I don't think light kills them, but they sure don’t like it. In the videos they tense up, their outline gets fuzzy and they recoil from it. Retreating, but only far enough to get out of the light. Waiting patiently just beyond its penumbra, beckoning. Irene says they’re ghosts. I don’t believe that, but whatever they are, they can’t talk. Yelling questions at them produces no reply, just persistent beckoning and a warm smile.

Some of the conspiracy types on social media have speculated that the day the sun went dark, Earth became joined to the spirit world at the dark points. Wherever’s sufficiently shadowed. They call NPs “the departed” and say that they beckon to us because it’s better where they are now. Supposedly they just miss us, and want us to enjoy Heaven with them, or whatever the spirit world is supposed to be.

But while that’s what I hear them saying, I don’t see any of them going off-path outside, running for the shadows wherever the city hasn’t put lights yet. Not anymore. Coming up on eleven years post-blackout, and the city still hasn't finished lighting everything up 24/7 like they promised to.

Understandably, Strangelite has a hard time finding people willing to set foot into the darkness to mount the LED panels, even for lucrative hazard pay. NPs don’t seem interested in the remotely controlled robots which entered use a few years ago, but those are still in short supply.

Dad went back to polishing his rifle. NPs don’t react to being shot at. That would seem to suggest they’re ghosts after all, but high speed photography revealed even before I was born that the bullets somehow never reach them, rather than passing through. Jury’s still out on whether NPs are solid, and nobody who’s ever touched one came back to settle the matter.

“It’s well past your bedtime, young lady.” Mom put a still-soapy hand on my shoulder. “What's that you’ve got on? Is that my lipstick?” She turned me towards her by the shoulders and began rubbing it off my lower lip with her thumb. I pushed her off me. “It’s just lip gloss mom, everybody at school’s wearing it. It tastes good, that’s all.” Mom harrumphed. “So did vaping.” …Whatever that means.

I awoke the next morning to the dull amber glow of the new fake sun, shining in through my window. For a brief moment I felt intense deja vu, as if I was a baby in my crib again. For a scant few seconds there, before I remembered who and where I am, it was absolutely real to me. The first discrepancy I noticed was the lack of shadows from the mobile.

Shadows, obviously, are a no-no. Experimental data is inconsistent about how big a shadow needs to be for NPs to step out of it, but the prevailing attitude is “better safe than sorry”. All bulbs sold now contain two additional backup lighting elements. All buildings have batteries in the basement to cover outages, building power grids have three sets of redundant wiring in case of shorts, and regulations don’t allow switches that can turn the lights completely off.

There is, mercifully, a consensus about the specific lumens value above which NPs can’t, or won’t, appear. Minimum illumination, by law, is about ten lumens above that. So we all sleep with the lights on, if dimly. Mom sometimes talks about what an adjustment that was, but it’s another one of those things I never had to adjust to. If she never told me otherwise, I might’ve assumed it’s always been this way.

I left illumination cranked down to the fixed minimum to spare my eyes as I climbed out of bed, rubbing away the sleep crust with my fingers. A faint glow creeps out under the edge of my bed. LED strips mounted to the bottom. After all, there may actually be a monster under there otherwise.

Beneath the blanket is safe, so far as anybody knows. They can’t appear anywhere there’s not enough sufficiently darkened space for an upright human being to instantiate. That saved us, at least, from having to put little lights inside boxes, pockets, our stomachs and whatever else.

I don’t know how Mom and Dad coped. I didn’t lose anything, but they knew the world before. To hear them tell it, any horrors can become mundane if they’re survivable. If nobody you know is affected, at least not frequently. Besides pandemics, the cold war was also supposedly like that. Regular people living regular lives, going to work or school with the constant awareness in the back of their minds that the nuke sirens might go off at any moment.

That’s me, surely? I’m not scared of the NPs the way Dad is. I assume that’s why he keeps the rifle always at the ready, even knowing bullets won’t stop ‘em if they come. Fear, and the frustration of feeling powerless to protect his family, when he was socialized from birth to believe that a father is either the family protector or nothing at all. At least, I hope that’s why.

I take the PATH network to school out of habit. We all did before the first fake sun went up, just a massive, internally illuminated helium balloon suspended a thousand feet over our heads by long, thin cables. The illusion would be more convincing if it didn’t nearly brush up against the tallest building. I always hear what an energy hog it supposedly is, but it only manages to be just bright enough that the dull, diffuse light from it barely exceeds the NP lumen threshold.

It does feel like a waste of money, when the city leaves the building and street lights on all the time anyways. In a dense population center it also doesn’t actually illuminate much because of all the buildings in the way, casting new shadows which must then be blotted out with spotlights. I’ve long suspected the fake sun is more of a symbol, and a comfort object. The public’s big, expensive, floating binkie.

Before the fake suns, we all just commuted using the PATH network, a subterranean layer of the city we already used to escape bitterly cold winters. It grew out of the network of subway platforms, expanded over many decades with space for shops and cafes. It’s where I grab a snack on the way to school if I skipped breakfast. PATH was already exhaustively illuminated, even before the sun went out. Problem solved, for some of us.

Montreal weathered those scary first couple of years well for the same reason, along with the various other far northern cities around the world with underground levels connecting their downtown buildings. Minneapolis was mostly fine because of their extensive skyway network. Helsinki barely noticed because fully half the city is underground, originally intended as shelter space in the event of war.

Suburbanites just kind of ate shit. There was no plan in place for them. Who plans for the sun to go dark? When I was little, I’d watch through Dad’s telescope as the distant constellation of lights I knew to be the windows of suburban homes went dark, little by little. Not quickly, there’d be perhaps one or two fewer lights out there in the darkness each time I looked. Now there are none. 

I read once that ancient man believed stars to be distant campfires. What a comfort that must've been for our ancestors as they huddled around the warmth and safety of their own crackling fire, which kept the wolves and other night creatures at bay.

Back when I watched those distant windows going dark, one by one, I often wondered what prehistoric man would think if he knew that the tiny campfires in the night sky would wink out one day. Surrendering to darkness, a few at a time, until all light is gone from the universe. If there's anything out there in the endless black void which the stars keep at bay, I imagine it's worse than wolves.

Years later, I still feel sick to my stomach thinking about what it was like for suburban families to die stranded, scared and hopeless. Until solutions were found permitting safe expansion of street lamps and other outdoor lighting, there wasn’t any way to send out repair crews to fix downed power lines. When an outage knocked out power to a neighborhood, they were all simply gotten. Eventually the city fixed external floodlights to repair trucks and sent them out to fix the power lines, but when the lights came back on, the houses were empty, save for a few bodies.

I’ve seen some TV interviews with the pale, shaky handful of survivors who lasted long enough to be rescued. Preppers mostly, their eyes subtly twitching as they describe the ordeal. Everybody else either starved in place, got taken when the power went out, or…took themselves out of the equation, along with their spouse and children. Family annihilators, I think they’re called.

By the time I’m washed, dressed and out the door, Dad has long since left for work. Despite growing up with it, I still sometimes boggle at how much the world didn’t end, even though the world ended. There’s still politics. There’s still commercials on television. People still watching TV, still buying shit, still gossiping about rumors. Still fucking, getting preggers, and bringing new life into a world where the sun is gone.

“The sun, of course, is not gone” Mr. Groenewald informed the class. We have a few other teachers with weird names, his is the only one I can reliably spell from memory because he spent a full ten minutes of our first day with him writing it in big letters on the board and pronouncing it for us. His pet peeve, I guess. I remember asking him if he was supposed to be teaching us life skills. He replied that it was absolutely a skill we should master, if we wanted to live.

The other reason everyone knows his name is because he accidentally opened a browser tab with foot porn on the projector once. We would’ve eventually forgotten if he didn’t get so embarrassed and butthurt about it. He’s been an unbearable hardass ever since, but once you lose your dignity, you can hardly get it back by yelling at kids. Or by wearing an obvious hairpiece, the reason everybody calls him Groenebald behind his back.

“If the sun were gone” he continued, “Earth would not continue in its orbit. We would all be skeletons encased in glaciers right now. Instead, it’s a seasonally typical eighty degrees or so outside.” He gestured to the translucent window display which showed not just the time and temperature but a radar-like indicator used to detect nearby NPs. “Can anybody tell me why Earth didn’t freeze?”

Alicia raised her hand, and was called on. Fucking Alicia has always been a pick-me. “The sun is still there, but something changed it. Sunlight is now in the portion of the light spectrum not visible to humans.” I clapped sarcastically, stopping when Groenebald threatened to keep me after. I’ve heard some rumors. He’s not on any registries that I know of, but that doesn’t prove anything except that he hasn’t been caught yet. Maybe I’m too suspicious, but balding middle aged men shouting inappropriate compliments at me on my way to school is a disappointingly common occurrence.

“That’s right Alicia. Such a good student. So smart. I only wish the rest of my students were just like you” he gushed. Oh, I bet he does. “Besides the immediate effect of bathing the solar system in darkness, plant life on Earth quickly began to struggle. Unmodified plants only ever made use of around 1% of the sunlight which struck them. So, a coordinated increase to the proportion of acetate in fertilizer compensated nicely, preventing total crop loss in the first year. Only a band-aid on a gaping wound though, as photosynthesis relies entirely on visible light.”

He popped a disc into his PC. Physical media came back into widespread use after the internet fractured due to the impossibility, in the first couple of years, of maintaining it. A recording of some boring dildo in glasses and a lab coat yammered at us about Project Strangelite, an only somewhat successful government-corporate partnership. Originally tasked simply with averting famine, their role quickly expanded alongside public need.

Stage one involved the hurried expansion of heterotrophic cultivation, indoor farming, and outdoor grow lights installed in farmer’s fields. Vast grids of illuminator pylons resembling oddly colored street lamps, spread out across the landscape like cities seen from the air. Stage two saw government biolabs CRISPR up variants of staple crops, algae, plankton, trees and grass that could photosynthesize under the new conditions. Crops because of the ruinous energy cost of the outdoor lighting, plankton and algae because of the impracticality of applying that same solution to the entire ocean.

Sometimes I feel like we owe thanks to the NPs. If not for them, we probably would’ve been bombing and invading each other when the famines started. Even a much smaller disruption of global agriculture would’ve starved millions, and the blackout fucked up farming a lot worse than that. All I heard about for many years was starvation and strife in countries I couldn’t pronounce, tragedy on a scale my kid brain was unprepared to comprehend the seriousness of.

I didn’t know government cheese caves existed until, post-blackout, we were eating it with every meal. Processed meats also remain a comfort food for me, after growing up eating long expired MREs mixed with whatever Mom could scrounge up. Culinary Stockholm syndrome. I suspect the same reason a lot of starvation foods our ancestors ate out of desperation, like moldy cheese, are delicacies today. MRE food isn’t far off from cafeteria food, more suited to the palette of children than adults. Which tracks, given the age range usually targeted for enlistment.

The beeping window display shook me from my quiet contemplation, followed by an irritating tapping sound. Groenebald shut up for what must be the first time in his life to investigate the source. He cupped one hand to his ear and followed the sound to one of the windows along the classroom wall. We’re on the second floor, so I figured it must be a bird or something. He pulled up the blinds.

Alicia screamed. A pale, smiling woman’s face peered in at us. Tap tap tapping at the window with one hand, beckoning with the other. Groenebald fell backwards against a desk, grabbing hold of it to steady himself. Everybody was out of their seats now, pressed up against the opposite wall, some recording the window face on their phones. “Don’t look at it!” Groenebald commanded. “It wants you to look!”

He got out his phone too. Frantically dialing, then engaging whoever was on the other end in feverish, hushed conversation. I made out “...unscheduled illumination gap just outside of classroom B-24”, then something about the automatic breaker failing, and "...activate the backups manually from your end". A few moments later the LED panel under that window kicked on, and the face vanished. But the damage had been done. There wasn’t any chance of keeping our focus for the rest of the period, not after that, however hard he tried.

There were a lot of “eyes up front, class!”, “eyes on me, not the window” and threats to keep us all after, which amounted to nothing in the end. Defeated, he put another video up on the projector and went outside to smoke. When lunch came, the face was all anybody wanted to talk about.

The chattering crowd was so noisy I almost didn’t notice Alicia crying by herself in the corner. Curious, I made my way through the agitated throng and set my tray down next to hers. “You don’t look so hot. Need one of these?” I offered her one of the vitamin D tablets they always serve with our lunches. Alicia asked me to sit somewhere else without so much as making eye contact. I couldn’t blame her as we’re pretty far from speaking terms, but I had to know.

After prying for most of a minute, she caved. “It was my mother” she bawled. I just kind of sat there, quietly stupefied, before recovering. “Your mother? Who disappeared…what, a week and a half ago?” Alicia nodded through the tears, which ran down her cheeks and fell into her food. I asked if she could be mistaken, given that she’d only glimpsed the face from the other side of the room.

“No, it was her!” she insisted, “and she looked right at me! She was beckoning me, she wants me to join her!” I writhed a bit in my seat, increasingly uncomfortable with the implications. “Alicia, it wasn’t your Mom. NPs aren’t people. They’re illusions or something.” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then her drippy nose. “It was her. That’s always how it happens, whenever someone gets taken. After a while, they start showing up in the shadows.”

“Or an NP imitating them” I corrected. Still tearful, she seemed to consider it for a moment. By now more than a few other students noticed the two of us talking. Much as I wanted more info, everybody already thinks I'm a nerd on account of the vocab I've picked up, bookworm that I am.

I’ve seen the popular girls kicking the shit out of her in the stairwell enough times to know that I shouldn’t be seen sitting with Alicia for too long, so I dipped. For the rest of the day, I replayed her words over and over in my head. First you get taken. Then people start seeing you as an NP. Or an NP that looks like you.

She heard that from a conspiracy blog, probably. I have flickers of memory corroborating it, bits and pieces I overheard from the news, but it’s like any other big issue of the day. Everybody pretends to know what nobody else does about it. Speaking with a confident sounding voice, telling scared people what they want to hear. That the danger is understood. Quantifiable, controllable.

On my next bathroom break I lit up a cig, then busted my phone out to look up NP conspiracy videos. No more receptive to their bullshit than usual, but wanting to see if I was right about where Alicia got her ideas from. Some fat dude in an anime shirt was complaining that "night people" is gender neutral PC lingo, and back in his day everyone called them "bogeymen".

I cracked a smile, remembering one of mom’s stories about her own parents scolding her for being scared of bogeymen, because they’re not real. Rather, they weren't at the time. I skipped to the next one, in which he showed off a spreadsheet he made comparing the names of people who disappeared, their date of disappearance, then if/when they were later sighted as an NP.

In every case where the identity of an NP was visually confirmed, it corresponded to someone who disappeared exactly eleven days prior. All down the spreadsheet, row after row, the interval was always the same. Wherever you go when they take you, evidently it’s a long trip. I tucked my phone back into my sports bra as some seniors came in, then hurried back to class.

Word got around quickly about the possible connection between the window tapper, and Alicia’s mother. She accosted me by the lockers after last period, accusing me of betraying something she’d told me in confidence. I denied it, swearing up and down that I didn’t know how it got out, but perhaps understandably, she didn’t believe me. Nothing was lost, it isn’t like she trusted me to begin with.

I took the surface route home after school, for a change. I had a lot on my mind and needed to be able to hear myself think, which I couldn’t in a crowded, echoing concrete labyrinth. The “sun” loomed large overhead, thin fabric surface visibly billowing from a light wind. It comes down during storms, ever since the first one tore free from its cables and got blown the fuck away to Zanzibar. That might’ve been a lot less funny had there not been redundant sources of illumination.

I squinted as I passed another row of out-facing lighting banks, mounted at intervals to the exterior of every building. They have filters to scatter the light somewhat but it’s still that irritatingly pure, sterile white light LEDs make. The subway tunnel, mercifully, is still illuminated along its entire length with bulbs that haven’t been changed since before the blackout.

The saving grace is that the white light blends somewhat pleasantly with the dull yellow light from that obscene parade balloon above me. I nevertheless wished I had sunglasses with me right then, smiling to myself at the irony. The leaves on the trees lining the boulevard also rustled in the evening breeze, their weird reddish coloration standing out all the more beneath the never-setting sun.

A billboard advertising sunlamp therapy for seasonal affective disorder cast a partial shadow, blotted out in the middle by some judiciously angled spotlights, per regulation. The ones underneath the billboard looked to be burnt out, though. That’s where I spotted my first dangler. I didn’t realize at first that’s what I was looking at though, as my brain didn’t process the silhouette as a person until I got closer than I should’ve.

Life returned to some semblance of normalcy about a decade after blackout. Insofar as everybody who was going to die from global food shortages already had, none of the nuclear armed countries pushed the button, and people went back to their routine of mindless labor and consumption. What nobody expected, after painstakingly adapting themselves to the mother of all black swan events, was another one.

Disappearances began immediately after blackout, and the first NPs appeared exactly eleven days after that. They became a constant fixture in everyone’s lives, moving forward. Always dangerous, but at a tolerable background level. Once we worked out that they behave in a predictable manner, public fear began to wane. Only to return when some of the NPs started changing.

Where your garden variety NP is just a smiling, beckoning likeness of a recently disappeared person, a dangler is that same NP several months later, apparently dead, hanging from a noose. The rope doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. It trails up into the sky, fading into nothing. Danglers are a rare sight, but have been documented enough times to confirm that they’re not just urban legends devised by trolls to stoke public fear.

I still sort of wondered if they were real though, and had so completely given up on ever encountering one that I didn’t even consider that possibility at first. The silhouette wasn’t moving, so I figured either it’s some sort of floating NP, or maybe a prank…until I saw the rope. 

It was obscured behind the billboard, only visible when I crept around one side of it. That’s when the dangler seemed to abruptly take notice of me, turning to face my direction and starting to move.

I froze, hoping without good reason that it would lose interest. When it didn’t, instead accelerating towards me, I turned tail and ran. I clasped one hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, on the off chance it could attract more. 

Glancing over my shoulder, the body dangling from the rope wasn’t looking at me or even moving at all, except to jostle and bounce on the rope as whatever was on the other end accelerated the swinging corpse after me, manipulating it from above like a perverse marionette. 

Once I made it into the spotlights, the dangler halted, just beyond their reach. It turned this way and that, the corpse's arms flailing along with the radial momentum as it spun. Like it was searching for some alternate, shadowed path it might still reach me with. 

I stared at it, then fished my phone out of my shirt and fumbled with it, trying to get the camera app open to record the apparition. Before I got it running, the dangler retreated into the darkened alley behind the billboard, as if camera shy.

Adrenaline blinded me to my own exhaustion until then. I’m in alright shape but I sneak cigarettes in the school bathroom pretty often, so I’m never going to be a track star. 

I doubled over coughing, pounding heart knocking down my ribcage from the inside. Only now, in the sober clarity afterwards, did I accept that I’d really seen one. That in fact, it had almost nabbed my dumb ass.

I just about choked on my tongue when a car I didn't hear stopping just behind me honked twice. “What’s wrong with you?” the driver yelled, “Get out of the damn street!” I staggered to the sidewalk, mesmerized by the blanket of light cast beneath the car by LED strips along its undercarriage, as it silently sped off towards the city center.

I didn’t dare to deviate from the most brightly lit stretches of sidewalk after that, and took the first staircase I spotted down to the PATH network. I’ve heard that curiosity killed the cat. If that’s true, it got off easy. 

Then again, NPs don’t show any more interest in animals than they do in robots. I don’t know what makes humans special, but for whatever reason, they’re only after us.

I didn’t tell Mom about the dangler when I got home, and not Dad especially. It was hard to keep my mouth shut, though stuffing it with dinner helped. Mom can sense when I’m hiding something and interrupted the meal to ask if there was anything I wanted to tell her. Cheeks puffy, full of mashed potatoes, I slowly shook my head before struggling to swallow.

After dinner I holed up in my room, hunched over my decrepit PC with the blank keys, letters worn off long ago. A hand me down from Dad, something of a luxury as nobody’s manufactured any new consumer electronics since the blackout. The school computers are the same, frozen in time. A snapshot of the latest and greatest from eleven years ago, perhaps never to be surpassed. 

After checking my email, I got busy browsing websites that just yesterday were a punchline to me. But in all my admittedly scant years of life, I averaged perhaps one NP sighting per week, and now I’ve seen two in one day. A dangler, no less! 

I needed to tell someone, but couldn’t trust my parents not to lose their shit and ground me. Online anonymity to the rescue, though it’s not what it used to be in a functionally smaller world.

The sudden failure of every solar powered telecom satellite contributed greatly to the balkanization of the internet. Certainly, the consequences were far reaching. For me though, all it amounts to is that the only websites consistently available from my home or school are all hosted in my city. 

Supposedly Strangelite's still busy erecting radio towers to bridge the gaps. Then again, we were also supposed to have 100% external illuminator coverage by last year.

A smaller haystack to hide my needle in means markedly improved odds of accidentally being identified by someone I know. After a few bad experiences along those lines, I learned not to leave any trace of personally identifying information connected to any of the accounts I use. 

Still, it was with tremendous apprehension that I emailed the author of the spreadsheet video. He’s probably on all sorts of government watchlists. Ones I meant to stay off of, if I could help it. 

I found his address in one of the usual places. Ads plastered all up and down the left and right sides of the page, hocking male virility pills, healing crystals and all sorts of other garbo I doubt if I could successfully place an order for, even if I wanted to. The ads remain though, like the billboards of a virtual ghost town.

A forum link caught my eye. Even as I composed the email in one tab, I opened the forums in another, switching back and forth as I thought of more questions to add. I had some uncharitable ideas of what sort of topics they might discuss in such a place, but the reality far eclipsed my expectations.

“NPs are aliens” seemed about equal in popularity to “NPs are demons”. Someone commented condescendingly that they were saying the same thing, since as everybody knows, aliens are just fallen angels in disguise. 

“Oh of course” I thought with a smirk, “how foolish of me to forget”. Silly as I felt reading what may well be schizophrenic cries for help, I did slowly grow to appreciate the culture.

Viewing it as a collaborative storytelling community alleviated my irritation. Every thread just seemed to be some loser’s attempt to spin a wilder yarn than the guy before him. To captivate an audience of commenters as large as possible, for as long as possible. A bunch of lonely dementoids vying to one up each other, each wanting to be the most interesting, made all too much sense with escapism in such high demand.

I’ve tried to argue with them on occasion, but it’s no use. Their bond is such that ten of them can share a room, all believing wildly different nonsense and they still chat happily with one another, united at least in their rejection of reality. It’s a big tent, in which only the naysayer is unwelcome.

Sometimes I’ll instead take their own idea and embellish it to ridiculous extremes. If they tell me it wasn’t planes that hit the twin towers, I’ll respond that of course it wasn’t, because planes aren’t real; They’re actually motion simulator rides with video screens for windows, which travel cross-country via subterranean rail tunnels. The ones we see in the sky are merely balloons, naturally. If you can’t lead someone out of darkness, better to lead them further in. Unproductive, yes. Entertaining? Also yes.

Some of the more interesting theories are religious. Though we go to church, I wasn’t raised to believe in any of it…but nothing about the blackout or the NPs ever struck me as rationally explicable. My gut told me, from the earliest age when I was able to grasp that the figures outside weren’t people, that something went terribly wrong with the world eleven years ago. The blackout was the tip of the iceberg. In some difficult to quantify way, everything’s been tainted since then. Every square inch of the Earth is wrong now. Every second in every minute, in every hour of every day.

Since NPs broker no scientific explanation I’m aware of, entertaining unscientific alternatives doesn’t feel like a trespass. It’s anybody’s guess what’s behind the phenomenon, so I’ve grown more and more comfortable listening to anybody. One thread proposed we’re all in purgatory now, and "the departed" are friends and family who have passed on, a common and popular narrative.

“They can’t be ghosts” one of the comments insisted, “otherwise why the danglers? They’re all hanging. If they were ghosts we should expect a more diverse representation of deaths. Some should appear burnt. Some shot, some drowned, and so on. But we don’t see that. Every one of them hangs. Why are they all hanging?”

Someone suggested it’s a message. That hanging is the only escape, a way to move on from purgatory to the afterlife proper. “That’s dangerous talk” someone responded. “My sister hung herself during the first year post-blackout. Lots of people did, and those of us who didn’t are all still very much on edge. Unless you have evidence, don’t go around telling scared, desperate people that salvation lies at the end of a rope.”

OP protested, but was dogpiled, seemingly a frequent occurrence as I browsed the other threads. Doing anything to put a spotlight on yourself risked attracting as much negative attention as positive, so I didn’t post anything. Instead I lurked, jotting down the occasional note.

One thread had a series of photos that caught my eye. The same NP in each, the pictures taken at weekly intervals over the span of a year. A few photos in, a noose appeared around its neck. It gave no indication, same blank smile they all have. Then the rope trailing up behind it, loosely, as if they were about to be hung. Still it stood calmly, smiling and beckoning, feet firmly planted on the floor. In all the photos after that, it appeared to have become a dangler. No longer standing, no longer moving or giving any signs of life, except that whatever it hung from would drag it around in pursuit of the living.

It made a strange sort of sense to me, though I couldn’t pinpoint the reason. Not so well received by other commenters however, whose pet theories the photos contradicted. Many accused the OP of doctoring the pictures with either editing software or AI. A few seemed intrigued as I was though, allowing the possibility that the images were legitimate and moving forward with their speculation from that premise.

Loads of threads were posted by apocalyptic types, trying to reconcile the blackout with passages from Revelations. One of them was just a long, convoluted argument over chapter 8, verse 12 which describes the sun and moon both darkening, as well as a third of the stars going out. They seized on this similarity and ignored, with great determination, the rest of the passage wherein only a third of the day and night are without light, with the Moon remaining visible…albeit blood red. I’d prefer that to the pitch black Moon we’ve got. It looked so pretty in pictures, like a giant nightlight for the world.

Some of these exchanges stretched back for several years, the same few users bickering endlessly. Trying to make sense of the blackout I suppose, to find meaning in it. I felt something like a digital archaeologist, scrolling back in time. Unearthing ancient posts from people who may well have been gotten since then, or even died of natural causes. The blackout was a dream come true for people like this. Just the shot in the arm world religions needed after decades of prosperity diminished public need for escapism, comfort and easy answers to the dwindling number of mysteries left in the world.

To hear Dad tell it, we got too comfortable. Solutions to problems like climate change and resource depletion were finally coming online. Poor India had just about finished solarizing every home, air conditioning the entire country…now so much obsolete e-waste rusting in landfills. Europe stabilized their grid, phasing out natural gas entirely by the time I was born. Mom and Dad grew up in an uncertain world, but by the time they married, the dragons of their day had been slain. For the first time in what must’ve felt like an eternity, life was like a dream…until the dream turned dark.

I took a break from doom scrolling about an hour in, rubbing my eyes, already sore from staring at the bright monitor in a dimly lit room. When I glanced out the window…like clockwork, there was one of ‘em in the alley across from our building again. So I busted out my nocs, knelt at the windowsill and took a closer look.

The face was entirely in shadow, so I couldn’t tell if it was the same one from before. It was dressed like a normal person. A growing unease tempted me to turn away, but something in me wouldn’t allow it. I sat there for maybe ten or eleven minutes in stillness and silence, waiting for the NP to do something I’ve not seen yet. Unhealthy fascination I guess, my version of birdwatching. It was interrupted some minutes later by the arrival of a Strangelite pest control van.

I squinted, then raised a hand to shield my eyes. The van was lit up like a Christmas tree! Covered top to bottom, end to end in out-facing illuminator banks, the underside in particular. Eye searingly bright, I couldn’t bear to look directly at it. The occupants climbed out, better able to tolerate the mobile light show because of adaptive goggles which could filter incoming light by spectrum. An enviable lens through which the world, for them, appeared absolutely normal.

Gogs are in short supply, and in high demand on the black market, if the news is to be believed. They’re like a portal back in time one can peer through, but not traverse. Alice’s looking glass, seen from within, the world as it once was on the other side. At school, I’ve seen footage captured with the image sensors from a pair of gogs. You can see the sun in the sky and everything, right where it’s supposed to be. You can also see the NPs, plain as day.

If that was supposed to clear up any mysteries, it didn’t. They’re not revealed, in the light of digitally revealed day time, to be alien monsters or anything of that nature. They just look like people. They’re us, by every appearance. The city workers blasted painfully bright light in all directions from their illuminator harnesses, a sort of upper body wearable rig which covered their torsos in out-facing LEDs.

I expect that saves them from lapses of judgment. Through their gogs, everything looks deceptively safe. The natural sunshine, plus all the outdoor lighting, makes it so they can’t see where the shadows are. The harness ensures they’re never in shadow, regardless. One of ‘em tosses a light ball down the alley. “Photon grenade”, by illuminorb ltd. A silly, sensational name for what's really just an internally illuminated transparent plastic capsule with as much battery as they could pack into it, for several days of run time.

Each of ‘em carries a dozen or so on their belt. Superfluous next to their harness, but it’s not for them, I don’t think. I’ve seen these guys on TV rescuing someone from a lone functioning street lamp during an outage. When they escort somebody not wearing their own harness, that person casts a shadow away from the harness, in which NPs can appear. Light balls prevent that, carving an illuminated path to safety out of the always-hungry darkness. Still, I miss when they simply used flares. This used to be a proper country.

I smiled despite myself as they walked by a sign, lighting it up in passing so I could make out the words. “Toronto” it read, barely legible beneath all the missing persons flyers taped to it, “famous for nightlife”. As I spectated through my nocs, the NP reacted to the encroachment, inching slowly away, its expression changing to one of anxiety and frustration. Little by little they backed it into a corner, which it vanished into when at last not even a sliver of shadow was left for it to inhabit.

I turned away, losing interest as the uniformed professionals got busy repairing the banks of lighting in the alley. So bright was the van, so bright were the harnesses and light balls however, that an ever-shifting influx of that sterile white light intruded through my window even with the blinds shut. It proved sufficiently distracting that I couldn’t focus on reading, and instead surrendered myself to sleep. 

I awoke to the sound of faint knocking at the door. I yawned, rubbed my eyes and swung my legs out from under the covers before shifting my weight onto them. In a few steps I was at my bedroom door. Only, upon opening it, there was nobody on the other side. “Mom? Dad?” I called out, keeping my voice down in case I’d imagined it, not wishing to wake them. Then I heard the knocking again…this time from behind me.

I turned, slowly. Still unsure if I really heard what I thought. But sure enough, the knocking came again. This time, unmistakably originating from within my closet. I stiffened subtly. As my bedroom light was still dimmed for sleep, I could see there wasn’t the usual light creeping out from under the closet door. Instinctively I backed a few steps away from it, as if that would make any difference to my guest.

As I stood there sweating bullets, the knocking just kept coming at fairly even intervals. No voice accompanied it, nor did I now expect such a thing, increasingly certain that it wasn’t a person knocking at the other side of my closet door. I considered waking Mom and Dad to tell them about the intruder. Dad in particular would certainly want to know. But I decided against it, as my anxiety slowly gave way to curiosity.

I meant to get a closer look, didn’t I? I meant to learn more about NPs. There was no safer, more discreet means I could think of. But how did it get there? Fixtures all have triply redundant lighting elements. The odds against all three failing at once seemed staggering. The socket itself, I decided, must’ve been what shorted out.

I surprised myself, feeling my heart begin to race as my hand neared the knob. How many close calls have I had over the years? Yet somehow, the fear stays fresh. I wrapped my fingers around the smooth, cool metal. Gripping the bulbous contours, I twisted until I heard the bolt retract. Then slowly, so as not to alert my parents in the other room, I eased the closet door open.

There she stood, looking exactly the same as she did outside the classroom window. Same dress, same sweater, not a single hair out of place. Only that vacant smile gave her away. Standing, staring, smiling. She raised a hand as if to grab me. Reflexively, I flinched. But of course the moment her hand crossed the penumbra, it faded into nothing. A smooth gradient of transparency, only reaching full solidity halfway to her elbow.

She withdrew her hand, visible and presumably tangible again, once shrouded in darkness. She frowned slightly, but otherwise didn’t emote. Didn’t even break eye contact. My heart throbbed, my mind moving at a mile per minute. What does this mean? Did she follow me here after the incident at school? Why me?

I leaned in as close as I dared to, and whispered “What are you?” …No reply. No visible reaction of any kind, save for slight wincing when her hand entered the light a moment ago and the frown afterward. Does it hurt? I asked her what light feels like. Where she’s from, what’s on the other side of the shadows. As ever, I received only stubborn silence in response…and that gentle, dead-eyed grin.

Glazed over, some kind of trance maybe. But I’ve seen them move in a purposeful way? My brain burst at the seams with possibilities. All the experiments I’ve ever wanted to try out on these things, whatever they are. So much idle guesswork I figured would remain forever confined to daydreams, and internet conspiracy theories-

I tensed up the moment it struck me. The realization that I alone, in that sea of prideful pontificators, have my very own pet NP to poke and prod. Put it down to the immaturity of youth, but the first place my mind went upon accepting the reality that I’ve got a real live NP trapped in my closet…was how much clout it might get me.

It was the work of perhaps five minutes, moving my desk and PC across the room so the little integrated webcam in the monitor pointed towards my closet. I snapped some stills initially, with myself out of frame, before it occurred to me that I should fashion some sort of mask to protect my anonymity. It also seemed likely I could be identified from my clothing, should anyone from school find these pictures online.

Lacking any better options for a disguise, I fetched a dusty, disused white sheet from the linen closet. I then tip-toed back to my room with it tucked under one arm. There, I cut a pair of eye holes in the center, then draped it over myself. I didn’t put it together, how that would come off…until the mean comments began rolling in. “Is this a sick joke?” one user posted. “I bet she’s naked under the sheet” said another, followed by a suggestive emoji. That set off a string of “lift the sheet” comments which only died down when someone suggested I was actually the adult woman standing in the closet, not the girl beneath the sheet.

“The old timey ghost is obviously composited into the shot for laughs” the theory went. “See where the sheet touches the floor? It's wrinkled all wrong. Besides, anyone can stand in a fully lit room, then lasso tool around the closet doorway and selectively darken that portion in an image editor. That way it looks like she’s standing in shadow.”

All the sycophants fell in line behind the alpha nerd, vigorously agreeing with his galaxy brained debunking of my very real bedsheet disguise. Their consensus that I faked the image now firmly established, my thread was deleted by a mod and I received a 24 hour suspension for “stoking fear with a low effort hoax”. I turned off my monitor, feeling equal parts frustration and disgust.

I flopped down on my bed, groaning. Forgetting for a moment that the thing resembling Alicia’s mother still stood there, waiting quietly in my darkened closet. Somewhat calmer now, having realized it wouldn’t be so easy to prove my situation to terminally online strangers on a post-truth internet, I wracked my brain for solutions. Mainly to questions like “how do I monetize this” and “How do I prove it’s real without doxxing myself”. But also “How the fuck do I sleep from now on, with an NP ten feet from my bed?”

That proved to be the easy part. It’s amazing what you can get used to! Underground commutes. Popping vitamins with every meal. Digestive disorders, hallucinations. An eleven year long night. Of course she was still in there when I awoke. It shouldn’t have surprised me except that, for those first few groggy minutes of unwelcome consciousness, I forgot about her.

That short lived fog of forgetfulness is at once merciful and cruel. Mom remarked once that every day when she wakes to a black, starry sky, it’s briefly surprising. Then, as dreams fade away, reality bleeds back in to replace them. It all comes back, little by little. The blackout. The NPs. Gamgam. 

Gamgam was among the survivors rescued from suburbia soon after the blackout. They found her huddled in a corner, surrounded by candles. She collects prayer candles, the ones in the tall narrow glass jars wrapped in a paper sleeve depicting the Virgin Mary. I’ve seen a few others bearing the image of Jesus, the Apostle Paul and so on. Gotta catch ‘em all.

To my knowledge, she hasn’t spoken a single word since that day. Every day except Sunday, she wheels herself into the corner of the nursing room’s common area, clutching one of her candles. Just in case, I suppose. On Sundays, we pile into the car and pick her up from the nursing home, then we attend church as a family.

That’s today? It creeps up on me every time. I reached for the closet door knob. I twisted it, still not remembering until I was just about to reach inside for my church dress. The woman inside frantically lunged for me, grasping at the air. Her hands never connected with their target, fading into nothing where they trespassed into the light. 

I only didn’t scream because I choked on my spit, stumbling backwards and falling against the bed. Dad heard my coughing fit and knocked on the door. His muffled voice asked if I was okay. “I’m fine” I called out. “Don’t come in, I’m not decent.” I sat there on the edge of my bed for another minute, quietly staring into the vacant eyes of the stowaway. Her frustrated expression once again replaced by placid calm, content to resume lying in wait within her cozy oasis.

Another close call. I scolded myself for the lapse, wondering if I shouldn’t tape a reminder on the outside of the door, or wedge it shut with a doorstop. I decided against either one, as it would only catch Mom’s attention. She snoops through my things once or twice a month, presumably to read my diary and search for my cigarettes.

She swears she can smell smoke on my clothes, but I gaslight the fuck out of her. Part of that entails writing new diary entries every couple days, painting a picture of perfect obedience, sobriety and chastity…precisely ‘cause I know she’ll read them, and still thinks I’m none the wiser. That’ll stop working one day, but for now, it throws her off my trail.

“Hurry up, we need to be at the nursing home in twenty minutes if we’re gonna make the morning service” Dad shouted from the kitchen. The NP in my closet took notice of my church dress dangling beside her. She removed it from the hanger, held it out in front of her and shook it a little. I laughed, despite my discomfort. As if I’d fall for that! I retrieved a broom from the corner by my desk, held it by the business end, and with the handle…I knocked the dress from the night woman’s clutches.

I then flipped it around and used the bristled end to tug my fallen dress across the carpet, until far enough from the open closet that I felt comfortable picking it up. I sighed. It’s all wrinkled now. Whatever, I can wear my baggy grey hoodie over it. The bigger problem is that I’m gonna have to figure out someplace else to store my nice outfits from now on. The woman-thing seemed mildly frustrated again. “What’s that?” I cupped my hand to my ear. “Got something to say?” As ever, only silence.

“Don’t you look nice” Mom gushed, licking her thumb and rubbing some imagined blemish from my face, once again forgetting my age. I brushed her hand away. “Stop it Mom, that’s gross. I’m not a kid, you know.” She scoffed. “No matter how big you get, you’ll always be my little girl. But take that hoodie off, will you? Gamgam will want to see your church dress! You can cover it on the way, but not at the home.”

I remarked that she’s seen me in this same dress a hundred times. Mom leaned in, and whispered “That may be, but with her memory the way it is, it’s always new to her.” Dad said nothing, but judging by his expression, he didn’t find it as amusing as we did. Before long, the three of us were seated in the family station wagon. I asked why we never take his work car, a black Strangelite issued sedan covered in out-facing illuminator banks.

“And get written up for personal use again? Do you listen when your mother and I fight?” I answered honestly that it just sounds like a bunch of muffled shouting to me, as I’m usually hiding in my room. “...Yes, well…that’s often what we’re yelling about. So no, young lady, we’re taking the station wagon. So far I’ve gotten twenty good years outta this heap, and if I’m good to her, she’ll give me twenty more.”

I grumbled that for what Strangelite pays him, we ought to be riding around in something from this century. He fell silent for a few minutes, and I worried he was mad. Only to then quip that one doesn’t get rich by spending money, the dadliest possible reply. “Maybe you’d rather live with my buddy Donovan? He buys a new car every year, and is just about due for his mid-life crisis.” I asked if he’s single, and finally got the earful I was expecting.

“I wish we could have just one car trip without any yelling” Mom blubbered, wiping a tear from her eye before fixing her makeup in the sun visor’s little mirror. No longer aptly named, except for the occasional blinding airplane, that mirror’s the sole reason it’s not been removed. Speak of the devil, an airliner soared slowly overhead, twinkling like a shooting star.

I pointed out that whether or not our conversations turn into fights is up to them. “Like hell it is young lady, with that smart mouth of yours. You’d better sort yourself out by the time we pick up Gamgam.” I crossed my arms, pouted and sank into the backseat with my sneakers up against the rear of the driver’s seat. Dad snapped at me to sit up straight. I ignored him. It evidently didn’t bother him enough to pull over.

I got my phone out and opened up the conspiracy forums. The top thread was some tiresome esoteric Nazi bullshit about the spiritual meaning of a black sun. I ignored it. 

The one under that was titled “Mayan connection?” Oh boy, I thought. This oughta be good. The post read “Ancient Mayans infamously held ceremonies where they performed ritualistic mass sacrifices in order to ensure the sun continued rising. I know it’s a long shot, but how many centuries before the blackout was the last ritual?”

The top voted comments were all clowning on him. The ones under that were more interesting. I don’t come here to learn anything, after all. The opposite, if I'm honest. “Maybe that’s what the Mayan calendar was really counting down to?” read one comment, with sixty three upvotes. “But didn’t the Mayan calendar end a year after the blackout?” read the first reply underneath it, revealed when I clicked the little down arrow to expand the comment chain. “Not on the dot” read the next one. “It would’ve been December 31st in that case, not November 11th.”

I twirled my hair between two fingers. Nonsense of course, but it’d make a good movie. That’s how I feel about most of the eyeball-deep bullcrap I wade through on here. The next thread down linked to some aerial footage which looked to have been taken from a helicopter. 

It was garishly bright and monochromatic, being night vision. At first, it seemed to be surveilling NPs milling about on the ground. Then it panned up, to reveal…hundreds, maybe thousands of danglers. In the sky. All at different altitudes, not moving perceptibly, except to sway in the wind.

“What does this mean?” read the top comment. “How high up do they go? To the edge of the atmosphere? Into space?” I thought back to the airliner. I reflected that this must be why they’re covered in illuminator panels now. Hitting just one dangler at 600 mph would ruin every passenger’s day in a hurry. That’s to say nothing of what would happen if a dangler got sucked into either of the engines.

Below that was another “Death to the False Sun” thread. Lots of these popping up lately. I think only the first one was genuine, just a long unhinged rant condemning inflatable floating illuminators like the one suspended over Nathan Phillips Square. 

The broken English and random capitalizations must’ve tickled people, as they began imitating his writing style. Then the copycat threads started to proliferate. Mods deleted them on sight for a while but gave up when it got out of control. Maybe figuring it’s just the flavor of the month, and would burn itself out.

Next up, another aliens thread. These never go out of style. Someone excitedly sharing grainy photos of lights in the sky, only to be told yet again that it’s just airliners. 

I scowl at the debunkers. I wish it really was aliens, more than anything. Come to rescue us from this nightmare, back to their own planet, orbiting a star which still burns brightly. A popular sentiment on this board, though about a third would prefer angels and the remaining third insists they’re one in the same.

“The sky is full of lights, if you believe it” someone from Team Angel wrote. “That horrid black sky turns clear and blue, dotted with clouds. You need only look with spiritual eyes.” Or gogs, someone quipped. 

Another replied “I’d wager I’m older than anyone here, and blind as a bat. The blackout didn’t change much for me.” This set off a flurry of questions about what software he uses to narrate onscreen text, and where he sourced a braille keyboard.

The holy roller waited out these distractions before continuing, undaunted. “Face it, eventually all of us will be gotten. The only real choice we have is whether to face our end calmly, with the dignity furnished by scriptural assurance of a better world to come…or in a panic. Dragged, kicking and screaming, into the shadows. I’ve made my decision, and time is running out to make yours.” 

Hmm! If I heard shit like this in church, I might attend voluntarily. I withdrew like a turtle into my big comfy hoodie, shielding my eyes from the gentle strobing effect of passing street lamps. 

“Aren’t you boiling alive in that thing?” Mom asked. Dad slicked back his hair and dialed up the AC. “It's a scorcher, alright.” Out the window, the stars twinkled in the jet-black sky. I couldn’t say why, but I wanted to scream.

When we arrived at the nursing home, I noticed iron bars had been added over the windows since last week. “Those are new” I remarked to Dad, peering over his shoulder at the rusted letters spelling out “Shady Maples Elder Care” above the entrance. 

He pulled in next to a shuttle bus with side decals bearing the same logo. Like every other car in the lot, harsh white light bled out from the undercarriage.

The outside looked like hell, paint flaking off, totally bare in large patches for the simple reason that it was too risky to repaint, on account of all the NPs milling about the periphery. 

A “safety tunnel” stretched from the front doors to the curb. All for show, just a skeletal aluminum trellis with white Christmas lights strung all along its length. They spared every expense, but it’s still kind of pretty. Like something from an outdoor wedding.

Inside, a bunch of feeble, baffled looking geezers play Bingo. As I watch, a goblinesque woman with a bald spot and horn rimmed glasses shouts “Bingo!” An orderly comes over to check her card. She didn’t have a Bingo. 

A minute later, she shouts Bingo again, perhaps not understanding the particulars of the win condition. Eventually the orderly stops checking her card and just lets her tire herself out.

She’s the lucky one, though not at Bingo. An air of quiet misery pervades this place, which she and a blessed few others like her have escaped, by way of dementia. How can she lament the loss of the sunlit world of her youth, when she cannot even remember yesterday? Neither can she despair that there isn’t a future. 

As her remaining years dwindle, the duration of the memory loop her awareness is confined to will steadily shrink to nothing. Merciful catatonia, at last residing in an eternal, unchanging now. 

Nearby wheelchair vegetables parked in the corners of the room stare wordlessly out the windows in placid bliss. They’ve long since realized the dream, to live entirely within a single perfect moment that never seems to end. 

“Rude young men locked all the windows” a grizzled, worn out voice croaks, alarmingly close. I turn just in time to see her latch onto my arm. “My gal pal visits me every day. Tap, tap, tapping at my window. So patient! So polite! I open the window to let her in, and all of a sudden everybody throws a big fuss about it. Now she’s stuck out there in the heat.” 

She crossed her arms and pouted, nodding at a pale, smiling face just outside the nearest window. Peering through the bars at us, the NP looked as if it was in prison, when of course it’s the other way around. Just then the ceiling groaned softly, presumably from NPs walking around on the roof. 

I try to pull free, but her bony little fingers have got a vice-like grip on my forearm. “Are you my granddaughter?” I start to deny it, but bite my tongue, not wanting to disappoint the old bat. “...Sure. Yes, that’s me. Your granddaughter.” 

It gets a smirk out of Dad, overhearing us as he scans the common room for Gamgam. “Tell me, what’s going on in the world? All the newspapers they give us here are back issues.”

I lean in and whisper “It’s the Germans. They won the war, and conquered America.” A devious little smile crept across her face. “Really? Oh, thank God!” She raised her arm in salute, and I busted up laughing. 

An orderly took notice and slapped his forehead. He hurried over and pushed the crone’s wrinkly, liver spotted arm back down in her lap, before scolding me. “No one ever lets me cook,” I moped.

Gamgam finally made her appearance, after emerging from the bathroom. Still clutching that stupid candle, still glancing suspiciously through her huge, thick glasses at every corner and crevice where even the smallest droplet of shadow was permitted to accumulate. 

She tensed up, tightly gripping the circular rails on both wheels to stop Mom from pushing her outside…until she saw the lighted trellis. That thing really does the trick.

Dad went out ahead of us, so the car would be waiting for her at the curb. She still nervously gripped the wheels off and on, wheelchair advancing in fits and starts along the short, blindingly illuminated path. 

“Settle down Gamgam” Mom cooed. “We’re right here with you. See? There’s Billy in the driver’s seat. It’s a straight shot to the car, you can’t go wrong.”

She let out a long, raspy breath, then reluctantly let go of the wheels. Transferring her into the backseat was a laborious process, but the chair itself at least folds away neatly into the trunk.

I pinch the tip of my pinky in the frame while I’m folding it, cursing softly and sticking my pinky in my mouth. I ought to be a pro at this, for how many times I’ve done it.

Gamgam stares at me with her giant magnified bug eyes on the way to church. At least, I think she’s staring. The whole time, she wheezed. Belabored breathing, which I couldn't tune out, and which I would’ve felt bad for complaining about. 

So I curled up in silence, getting my book out. Now and again I peered out the window, when I thought I saw the pale, gaunt faces of NPs looking back. Just pedestrians I think. NPs would be smiling.

After the nursing home, church gave me serious deja vu. Row after row of hobbled, shrunken old codgers nodding off in their pews. I’m the youngest one in attendance by a long shot. 

Once, I asked Dad why church is always filled with the elderly. He told me they’re “cramming for finals”, whatever that means. How much of the sermon can they even hear?

“Are you my granddaughter?” croaked a familiar voice. This time I was quick enough that she didn’t nab my arm, so she gripped the front pocket of my hoodie instead. When I glanced at Dad he was frowning and shaking his head, so I didn’t answer. 

The crone’s attendant family members noticed, hushed her, and pried her hands free. A salt and pepper haired man I figured for her son whispered an apology before seating himself between us. 

That’ll be me one day, won’t it. What a lot I have to look forward to, and that’s if the NPs don’t get me. The balding pastor droned on about the wonder and beauty of the next world to the hopeful mob of withered flesh skeletons, paradoxically seduced by the promise of post-mortem paradise, yet plainly terrified to die. 

How can they truly believe their best life begins only when this one ends, having also taken every precaution until now to stay alive for as long as humanly possible?

Clinging desperately to life, but for what? To stretch out their worst years? Their sickest, most feeble years in a world that already ended? If there is a God, surely turning off the light was our cue. Party’s over, time for guests to go home. Yet we loiter, long after closing. Curtains drawn, music stopped, dancing in the dark.

“I want everyone to close their eyes,” the pastor commanded. I did so, not wanting to be the odd one out, and welcoming a chance to rest them. “Now, you fine folks know I would never tell you anything that wasn't absolutely true, which hadn't come right from His mouth. I say only what He wants me to tell you.” 

I couldn’t see them nodding but I heard swishing hair and grunts of affirmation. “Now tell me. Can you see the light? Big, round and warm, sitting high in the blue Summer sky, puffy white clouds all around it.”

Confused silence slowly gave way to anxious chatter. “Quiet down now. As quietude helps us hear, so darkness helps us to see His light. Look with your heart, not with your eyes! It burns so brightly in this darkness that I dare not look with my eyes opened! You all nod, but do you understand? Who gave us this gift of sight? Only because He did the impossible, can we see the invisible.”

I didn’t see anything other than the back of my eyelids. It was an ongoing fight not to fall asleep. It sounded familiar though and I felt I now had a good idea of who wrote that forum post. But everyone around me went along with it, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame them. Reality doesn’t have much to offer as of late.

“In these darkest days, the final part of the final hour, we look not to the sun for light, but to the Son.” I inwardly groaned. “Now’s not the time to turn away from Him, but to draw nearer, clinging ever more tightly. The time for doubts has gone, now is the time to recommit to our faith, nothing changing in these things that we believe. With your eyes open, what do you see? Only a world of darkness, and terror. But with them closed, what does your heart see? Which of the two senses will you trust?”

When at last we were permitted to open our eyes, I first peered over at Gamgam. Tearfully gawking at the pastor through those enormous, thick lenses and clutching one of her prayer candles, gently wheezing. Bug eyed and desiccated, only just alive. 

“That’ll be me one day” I inwardly repeated, before suddenly reconsidering the proposition. “That’ll be me one day…if I allow it.” I tensed up, mildly stunned by the subtle but transformative reframing. Somehow, after fifteen years of life, having only now realized I have a choice in the matter. 

I don’t have to turn into Gamgam if that’s not what I want. I don’t have to shrivel up into a wheelchair vegetable, unceremoniously winding down on my way to the grave, mind decomposing ahead of my body. That’s only my end if I choose it. I’m the one in control, I always have been.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner? With the clarity of hindsight, it now seemed like it must be obvious to everyone. I looked around the church and wondered if the rest of them knew. Couldn’t be, I decided, else the pews would be empty. 

I dwelled on it during the long, slow procession through the illuminated safety tunnel, from the church to the parking lot. It could happen now, for all I cared. If only the power to these lights would fail. If only there weren’t two levels of backup waiting to kick in, it could all be over today. 

All that anxious hand-wringing uncertainty about the world to come, resolved in an instant, all doubts at once laid to rest. We might abruptly find ourselves reunited in paradise! Or if not, at least be relieved of this tiresome half-life.

I noticed NPs in my peripheral vision, standing silently in the darkness around the edge of the sweltering parking lot. Inhumanly patient, waiting just beyond reach of the overhead lamps. After I folded Gamgam’s chair and stowed it in the trunk, I helped Dad hoist her into the backseat. 

She stared at me while I buckled her in, and again as the station wagon pulled out of the lot. I wondered briefly if she could sense something in me had changed. Then again, she always stares.

The faint, intruding glow of the street lamps rhythmically strobes as we pass them. So many identical pairs to either side of the illuminated highway, stretching out to the unseen horizon...a path laid down upon nothing. 

The treeline whipped by on either side, visible only in silhouette against the starry night sky. Most of ‘em are probably still green too, surviving on sugar stores.

I pull my knees up to my chest, reading my book. Just then, the car violently lurches as Dad yanks at the wheel, cursing. I hear a dull thump, and feel the impact through my seat. Tires screech, Dad frantically spins the wheel in the opposite direction to compensate.

“What was that??” I cry. He doesn’t answer right away, exhaling sharply as he runs his fingers through his slicked back hair, eyes bloodshot and twitching. Only when Mom asks the same question does he answer. 

“Headlights went out. We hit an NP. At least I think that’s what it was.” In the mirror I glimpse sweat droplets snaking their way down from his hairline to his nose. He dabs them away with his sleeve, bringing the car to a stop on the shoulder. 

“Dad?” I pointed to the mob of NPs gathering at the side of the road, like vultures circling a starving coyote. “DAD??” He turns around in his seat just enough to meet my gaze, whispering “Settle down, I see ‘em.” 

He holds a finger to his lips, perhaps figuring noise will attract more. Sure enough, before long the small cluster of interested NPs has grown to a crowd, stepping awkwardly over animal bones littering the side of the road.

We all gasped in unison when the streetlamp winked out. Of all the shit luck, though the station wagon’s exterior illuminators held the line. The engine idled, soft but audible. A comforting purr, safeguarding our little metal bubble of normalcy from the ravenous unknown. I heard the door hinges and suspension groan as Dad stepped out.

“Dad, no! You’re going out there??” He snapped that someone has to. “Is it gonna be you?” The barb cut unexpectedly deep. I thought to explain that I was just scared for him, before realizing he was too. He gets nasty when frightened, the way I suppose anyone does. I heard the hood creak as he lifted it. NPs encroached from the roadside, no longer restrained by the street lamp.

The station wagon’s illuminator banks managed perhaps a six foot throw, but as Dad locked the hood open with the prop rod, his body blocked them. Casting a long, narrow shadow from his feet, it wasn’t quite wide enough for an NP to wedge itself into, though that didn’t stop them from trying. Several milled about frantically behind him, jockeying for position. Ever hungry, ever vigilant.

I heard muffled cursing. Probably shocked himself, fucking with the wires. Working hurriedly, recklessly, to swap out those busted headlights with spares. All the while, the NPs performed their own fevered dance just behind him, following his ever-shifting shadow as he worked. Only because it never widened enough to admit one of them did I still have a father to drive us home, once the new lights were in.

Except, of course, it wasn’t that easy. The first dangler emerged from the trees as Dad climbed back into the driver’s seat, slamming the driver side door. Its rope snagged on the overhead street lamp, swinging haplessly from it, lower body fading each time it swung within reach of our lights. 

The NPs encircled us now. We’d have been out of luck, except that the new headlights worked. Flickering to life, temporarily obliterating the NPs in front of us.

A strange sensation overcame me. Not fear as I knew it, but morbid invigoration. This, too, might’ve been the end. Less elegant than if the safety tunnel had lost power, the NPs clawing at our car doors, prying us from our seats before dragging the four of us into the shadows. But it really might’ve been over, had he not carried spares. If a bad fuse blew out the spares too, or if the engine broke down.

“How long has the engine been off?” Dad turned the key in the ignition. Sputtering, but no roar. “We’ve been running the lights on battery??” He pounded the dash in frustration.

I laughed, despite myself. I caught him glowering at me in the rear view mirror before he went back to twisting that key, over and over, praying under his breath.

The engine whimpered. Moaning and groaning, as if in protest that we would not allow it even this meager rest. Now and again, Dad would eyeball the voltmeter in the dash. 

I knew as well as he did what would happen, should that little needle finish its gradual leftward creep.  He gave it a rest for a moment, then turned the key once more. Gamgam set to whimpering. 

Mom also started losing it. “Twenty more years, William?” He ignored her at first, stubbornly turning that key while the engine struggled to turn over. “Should’ve taken the other car” I grumbled. 

That’s what finally set him off, pivoting this way and that in his seat, alternating between who he was shouting at. Strands of hair falling down before his eyes, sweaty forehead glistening under the car’s feeble interior lighting as he rattled our eardrums and sprayed us with spittle.

Once he tired himself out, Dad and I sat in grim silence while Mom wept. “Hand over your phone, young lady.” I didn’t object, but watched closely lest he snoop through my texts. Instead he called for a Strangelite van. 

Dad composed himself impressively quickly, smoothing his hair back and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief as he spoke to the garbled voice on the other end. All the while I kept an eye on the voltmeter, counting down the precious remaining minutes until the NPs would have their way. 

I was the first to notice the other car. It must’ve rolled to a stop at the opposite shoulder during Dad’s hissy fit. A woman’s pale, weary face watched us from within. I pointed the woman out to Mom and Dad, then waved to her. No reaction. I gestured for her to roll her window down, which she also ignored. 

“Best not to bother her” Dad concluded as he handed back my phone, “She can’t give us a jump if she needs one herself.” An ugly, transactional calculus, it seemed to me.

But she didn’t offer to jumpstart our car. Nor did she solicit a jump from us. Instead, she shut off her illuminators. That caught Dad’s attention in a hurry. “...Look away, sweetie.” But I couldn’t pry my gaze from the unfolding spectacle. So instead, I began recording. 

“Dad, what’s she doing?” He repeated his command, this time more sternly. The NPs lost interest in us, shuffling around the limits of the station wagon’s illuminators, heading for the other car.

“Dad, she’s…she’s getting out.” The door opened and a disheveled blonde woman in a Strangelite uniform with bags under her eyes stepped out onto the asphalt. Still under the protective spotlight cast down by the street lamp, she wobbled on her high heels for a while, trembling as if drunk. 

She stared down the NPs as they gathered at the edge of the light, just inches between them. Then, as I gasped and Mom covered her eyes, the woman stepped over the boundary.

In that moment, they were upon her. So many pale hands seized her by her hair and clothing. She screamed, briefly…but then she was gone. It happened so fast, I couldn’t explain where she went. 

Into the darkness, swallowed up by the night. Gamgam wailed, the most noise I’ve ever heard out of her, and thrashed about in a panic. I held her down, best I could, while Mom fainted. 

When the Strangelite van appeared, a steadily growing spot of blinding white light on the horizon, our illuminators were comparatively quite dim. Right on the verge of winking out. That, too, might’ve been the end of it. 

But once again, the NPs were cheated. Our lives, such as they were, extended that much further for reasons none of us could articulate. Limping along, propped up time and time again by fiat. By hail mary feats of engineering and emergency response that, all told, did us no favors.

The drive home was a tense and silent one. The one time I spoke up, it was to ask why the woman surrendered herself. The only answer I received was “I thought I told you not to look. Some people are just sick, that’s all.” After his outburst earlier, nerves still raw, I knew better than to press the matter. Didn’t stop me from dwelling on it, though.

Gamgam more or less calmed down by the time we got home. Fidgeting in the elevator, peering around corners on our way through the halls, but otherwise docile. 

An hour later I lay in bed, donning headphones to drown out the muffled voices of Mom and Dad shouting at one another in the living room. I made out something like “non-regulation headlights” and “I was gonna get around to it”. I rolled onto my side and turned the volume up. 

The following day at school was a one-two punch of logic worksheets and yet more mandatory counseling, this time because a dangler broke one of the top floor skylights, which I wasn’t even around for. 

Logic isn’t so bad, it’s a three week program nested in between the regular math lessons. Just a lot of word problems like the ones we were already doing, but with fewer numbers involved. 

I don’t mind word problems in the least, I’m good at ‘em.  Today’s worksheet was about some unsolved problem in computer science, “P vs NP”.  I did a double, then triple take when it turned out to have nothing at all to do with night people. Had ‘em on the brain, I guess.

The counselors, on the other hand, are proof positive that gay sex isn’t even the gayest thing out there. The one assigned to me was some turd blossom in a frumpy sweater named Shauna. 

I came in hot, perhaps unfairly so, grumpy on account of the counseling session interrupting my usual after-lunch bathroom smoke break. Picking up on my energy, Shauna started out as the good cop.

“I can tell you don’t want to be here. Neither do I. Frankly, the skylight business was overblown. Gum?” I didn’t reply just yet, but I did take the gum. 

I chewed the flavor out of it, then blew a modest neon green bubble as Shauna went on about this and that. The usual counselor spiel about adolescent turmoil, changing bodies, social isolation and not having to shoulder it alone.

When I didn’t answer, she didn’t miss a beat, moving on to the next rehearsed platitude. Gotta hand it to her, she doesn’t waste time and must’ve dealt with plenty like me before. 

Shauna rifled through some paperwork from a manila folder in her lap. “It says here that your proficiency levels at reading and writing tested somewhere between superior and distinguished.”

I smirked. “Those are really what they named the levels?” Shauna slid the dossier over to me. “Are you supposed to let me read my own file?” She winked conspiratorially. “I’ll only get written up if you narc on me. You’re cool, right?” 

Despite my best efforts to remain deadpan, that provoked another smile. “It says that in your training somewhere, doesn’t it? Something like, “when dealing with transgressive students, performative transgression may ingratiate you.” A flash of recognition in her eyes. I’d knocked her off balance.

Shauna threw her hands up in exasperation. “Maybe so! But cut me a break, kiddo. I’m just trying to make sure your potential doesn’t go to waste. Have you thought much about your future?” 

My smile faded. I sat there for a time, cold and quiet, before Shauna repeated the question. I interrupted her. “Future? FUTURE? That’s a good one! Have you looked outside lately?”

She blinked, then asked what the weather had to do with my career prospects. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe that there hasn’t been a sunrise in eleven years? Future, she says. WHAT future?” Now concerned that she might be losing control of the situation, Shauna hurriedly reassured me that my feelings were normal for my age.

“Nothing’s been normal for a long time, Shauna. Stop pretending! Why are all the grown ups like you? How do you convince yourselves everything’s fine? Will it happen to me? When will I start lying to myself that night people are normal, or that a sunless world has any future at all?” 

Shauna now sat motionless, stupefied by my outburst. If there’d been a silent alarm, I imagine she’d have tripped it by now. But I needed to vent, and finally had someone’s ear whose judgment I didn’t care about.

“Yesterday I saw a woman get nabbed, not twenty feet from me. There, and then gone, before I could even breathe. Not by accident either, she wanted it! Practically threw herself at ‘em. You know what Dad said?” Shauna, still wide-eyed with pursed lips, slowly shook her head. “He said she was sick. But do you know what I think? I think we’re the sick ones, for living.”

I realized then that I’d been shouting at her, like dad does with me. Slumping back into my seat, I buried my face in my hands and tried to slow my breathing. Shauna cautiously stood, returned the paperwork to the folder, then gingerly put the folder back into the filing cabinet. 

“Well, uh. It sounds like you have…a lot going on. I am a counselor, but not the kind you need. Frankly this sort of thing’s above my pay grade. I’ll…make a note in your file.” From behind my hands, I mumbled “You do that.”

Crying fucked up my mascara during the walk home. Trying to hide it only would’ve attracted more attention, so after dabbing ineffectually at it with tissues, I gave up and let the remaining traces of it run down my cheeks. 

I was still a mess when I spotted Alicia in the alley, also crying. Her cheeks and thighs were badly bruised, and her nose bled profusely, staining her blouse. 

She peered pitifully up at me, still holding a wadded up tissue to her nose, fully soaked through with blood. “What happened to you?” she croaked, voice hoarse from crying, gesturing feebly to my mascara. I rushed to her side. “Me? What happened to YOU?” She sniffled, crimson droplets splattering the cement. “The fuck do you think it was?”

I sat down beside her in the alley, our backs against the papered-over wall, illuminator banks humming at a barely perceptible frequency just above our heads. Not wanting to get her blood on my clothing, I ripped some of the ever-present missing persons flyers off the grimy brick wall and laid them down beneath me, like birdcage lining. “You sure you’re okay being seen with me in public?” A sincere question, near as I could tell, despite the bitter intonation.

“I doubt anyone from school would find us here.” Something about my answer must’ve been funny as Alicia snorted. She then pressed one finger against her right nostril, blew a horrendous wad of mucus and congealed blood out the other. 

I grimaced and scooted away from it best I could without getting up. For lack of a handkerchief, I offered her a tampon, which she reluctantly accepted.

“Why don’t you ever fight back?” I wondered aloud. Again, she found it terribly funny. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? One versus three, all athletes. Yeah why don’t I bust out the karate moves and-” 

I conceded that it was a stupid question. But unavoidably, so was the next one. “Have you spoken to faculty about it?” She asked if I knew Shauna. I smiled weakly, and sighed. “Got assigned to her as well, did you? How many counselors did they even hire…”

I found out from Alicia then that it’s just Shauna and Patrick, one for girls and the other for boys. I briefly wondered if Patrick’s any better at the job. I imagine anyone would be. “It didn’t help” Alicia groused, “It never does. Even before, when I would complain to Mr. Groenewald, he’d just tell me to ignore them. Or “it takes two to tango”. 

I shrugged. “What can they do? Expel ‘em all? That’s six angry parents to deal with. If they throw you under the bus instead, it’s only two.” She held up a single finger, and I suddenly remembered her mother. “Ah, yeah, sorry. One angry parent.”

Alicia folded her arms, and narrowed her eyes. “That’s what Shauna said. You sound just like her.”  I assured her I hated Irene and her underlings just as much. 

“I’m not saying it’s right, either. But that’s the way the world works. It’s a school, not a courthouse. If they arbitrated every student dispute, that’s all they would do, all day every day. No teaching would get done.” Alicia remarked that barely any teaching gets done anyway.

“You’re not wrong. Boomers say all sorts of shit that sounds superficially wise, but turns out not to be true, don’t they. Like “violence never solves anything.” Sure fucking works for Irene, doesn’t it?” 

Alicia laughed, sniffled and nodded. “My dad told me that when I was little. Talk about a confusing thing to hear from the same guy that paddled me when I misbehaved.”

The more stories we traded, the more surprised I became at just how much we had in common. If not for Alicia, probably I’d be the one at the bottom of the totem pole, getting my ass beat by Irene. 

Half my brain thought “better her than me”. The other half knew enough to feel ashamed for thinking that. I wonder if that’s maturity creeping up on me.

I withdrew a pack of cigarettes from my sports bra and offered one to her. She received it with undisguised awe, as if I was handing her a loaded gun. 

“Oh, I couldn’t.” I teased her a little. “Don’t be such a puritan. It’s perfect for stress, you’ll see.” I withdrew my lighter next, and before long she was cautiously taking her first drag.

Alicia coughed, hacking and sputtering. I grinned, reminded of my first time. “How’s it taste?” I asked. “Like burnt toast and boob sweat” she whined, before coughing again.  I slapped her back and laughed. Before long though, she was puffing away at it contentedly, the nicotine starting to kick in. 

I offered her a xan as well. Apparently a bridge too far, she refused. “I would get in enough trouble if Dad found out I was smoking.” I shrugged. More for me.

I wound up inviting her over. Not sure why except that I felt sorry for her, and guilty for mostly avoiding her until then. Not the healthiest basis for a blossoming friendship, but even before we arrived at my apartment building, I’d begun making other plans. After helping her clean up her face in the bathroom and lending her one of my shirts to change into, she sat down on the edge of my bed.

“You have so many books”. I turned around to find her perusing the contents of the shelves over my computer. “Don’t you? There wasn’t much else to do but read for those first couple years, even if you had a computer. Not until Strangelite got parts of the internet back up.” 

A flustered Alicia admitted that she learned to read later than most. “I don’t read much outside of school anyway. Maybe I ought to. But it looks like you never stop! Is this why you talk that way?” What felt, to me, like a loaded question.

“What way do you mean? Something wrong with my grammar?” She shook her head bashfully. “Nevermind. I just don’t often hear anyone using some of the words I’ve heard from you, even teachers.” 

I confessed that I’m online too much, which is just a lot of reading.  “That’s to blame, I think, more than the books.” Alicia couldn’t relate. “I don’t even have my own computer. My dad says I would just use it to talk to boys.”

“That’s surely the point of it” I thought, depending which boys she means. Since there would be no new consumer electronics manufactured for a long time, Strangelite prioritized illuminating landfills so they could mine for e-waste. Some of the computer components were repairable, and could be resold to the steadily dwindling number of home computer owners. 

The government, Strangelite and schools got priority access to the most recent tech, on account of the necessity of computers to the economy, education and defense. TV and appliance components, on the other hand, were somewhat more equitably distributed.

“You’re not missing much” I confessed. “It’s an asylum in there, run by the inmates. You wouldn’t believe what people are saying.” She asked if I would show her. It was something to do, so I turned the old beast on, relishing the noisy whirr of the hard drive spinning up. 

Youtube’s front page was replete with footage from the recent lunar rover. Not wanting to listen to some piss gargling influencer talking over it, I clicked on one of the few without commentary.

The feed switched back and forth intermittently from the camera on the lander, to the one on the rover. Floodlights on both illuminated a huge swath of the barren lunar desert, in all directions. 

Earthrise was visible only because of all the electrically illuminated population centers and highway networks. A slowly spinning concentration of artificial constellations, not among those known to our ancestors.

I thought I glimpsed moving forms. When the rover’s image sensor shifted the spectrum, at once, all was revealed. There were none of the usual NPs, to my surprise. That’s what I dreaded, having wondered before whether they might infest an unlit Moon. 

Instead, suspended at every altitude were uncountable, densely packed flocks of danglers. Not even doing anything, nor swaying as they usually do, in the absence of wind.

“Moon’s haunted” read the first comment, with several hundred thousand likes. “Moon’s haunted” read every other comment under that for several pages. Copycats, fighting over table scraps from the top rated reply. Makes me sick. It’s probably a reference to a movie I haven’t seen, or some boomer shit Mom and Dad would understand.

Only when I scrolled far enough down did original comments begin to appear. “This is gutting”, read one. “All this time, I held out hope that the Moon was still safe…that maybe we could establish a lunar colony one day, and escape…all of this.” 

Another tried to comfort him. “Alpha Centauri is only four light years away, and it’s still shining bright. That means not every star went dark.” The next video in the queue was a congressional hearing about whether to defund NASA in light of the findings.

“Oh! That reminds me.” I got out my phone and plugged in the USB cable. Alicia wanted to know why, but I kept her waiting until I copied the video over. When I opened it, she quieted down in a hurry, leaning in closer to the screen once I hit play. “Did you record this?” I nodded proudly. We both watched in tense silence as the woman stepped out of her car.

“That’s a Strangelite uniform” Alicia whispered. “...But that’s not one of their vans.” I mulled it over. “Must be off the clock.” She winced, and subtly recoiled, when the uniformed woman was gotten. Alicia then took over for me, scrubbing back through the video, examining it frame by frame. “I’ll bite. What are you looking for?” Alicia hushed me, playing it back again and again, slowing it down each time.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that she stopped next to another car? In her work clothes?” I rubbed my chin. “I guess so, now that you mention it. What are you suggesting?” Alicia speculated that it might’ve been a cry for help. “Or an intentional statement of some sort” I added. “In which case, she was brave if you think about it.” Alicia ignored me, still scrubbing carefully through the timeline.

Eventually she managed to single out a still frame where the faces of a dozen or so NPs were visible, albeit not with the clarity one might wish for. She screencapped the video, opened it in an image editor, and zoomed in. “Anyone you knew?” I asked.

She sighed, crestfallen. “I don’t see her.” She went back to searching through the video for more clear shots of NP faces. “You gonna tell me who you mean, or should I guess?” At last she stopped, staring at the screen, reflections of the video visible in her eyes. “My mother. I guess I was hoping…I don’t know. That she’s still out there, somewhere? That maybe she’s in a better place.”

I took control back so I could upload the video to my channel and link it on the forums later. That would shut up the naysayers who called my closet video a fake. “I promise you she’s not” I commented, offhand, as I typed in a long string of tags for SEO. 

Alicia’s voice turned sour. “Just how can you possibly know that?” Without thinking, so buried was I in the task at hand, I blurted out: “Because she’s in my closet.”

Alicia blinked a few times. Then glared at me and punched my shoulder. “That’s not funny.” I held my tongue for a moment, realizing what I’d said. Then figured, “in for a penny, in for a pound”. 

I walked a few steps to the closet, and swung the door open. Alicia fell out of my chair. Kicking at the carpet, scooting backwards until she ran out of room to. Mouth open as if to scream, but nothing would come out.

“M..Mom??” she stammered. Alicia’s eyes darted between the apparition of her mother in the darkened closet, and me, standing there smugly, at last having found someone I could share my secret with. 

She didn’t seem impressed. In retrospect I don’t know why I thought she would be. “How long have you known about this?” Alicia demanded, tone now accusatory. I made a show of counting on my fingers. “Uhh…couple days I guess? Less than a week.”

She stood, composed herself, then grabbed me by my jacket and shook me violently. “And you didn’t tell me??” I protested that initially I was just as shocked, not yet decided what I ought to do about it. 

After that, my main concern was preventing Dad from finding out and calling Strangelite to come fix the socket. “Besides, you and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms until today.”

She simmered down somewhat, though plainly still a bit cross that I kept this from her. I escaped her wrath for the time being mainly because the NP resembling her mother now commanded Alicia’s focus. 

She trembled as she slowly, warily approached the closet doorway. “Mom? It’s you, isn’t it?” No reply of course. Alicia teared up. “Don’t you recognize me?”

The NP just stood there, smiling. Same old thousand yard stare. Same lazy beckoning. It might’ve been a touching reunion, had they both been human. Still, one sided as it was, something did stir within me as I watched happy tears streaming down Alicia’s face. Processing her grief after a fashion, baring her heart to a creature that couldn’t understand a word of it.

“Dad and I kept your stuff” she blubbered. “Everything’s exactly how you left it. We even wash your clothes every so often.” I couldn’t quite tell whether Alicia truly believed that thing to be her mother, or if on some level she knew better. If she might just be fooling herself on purpose, so badly did she need this release.

The NP reached out for her, hands blurring into nothing where they trespassed into the light. Alicia held out her own hands, extending them cautiously, their fingers almost touching. 

How she ached for her mother’s embrace. Not only in that moment, but ever since she was taken. I could scarcely imagine that kind of grief, never having lost a family member.

“How terribly cruel” I thought, “to be separated from what she desires most by the width of a hair”. Those millimeters may as well have been miles, for how impassable the gulf between them was. As far apart as life and death, sharing the same world…yet never touching it in the same place, at the same time. How many more must be like Alicia, always reaching for something they dare not grasp.