The sky glowed a bright orange. A long cloud drifted in the distance, near the horizon, painted red. Wind blew across the lands and lifted from the ground dirt, and dry leaves, and a few long strands of hair.

A man was sitting, leaning on a boulder, outside his small flaking house. It was the middle of summer and the last rays of sunlight touched his face, and the soft currents of air took the heat away, and his hair fell from his head one strand a time. His eyes had been dried out, and the empty sockets in his head peered into the nothing, and his mouth rested wide open, and his skin turned ever thinner.

“Hello there, Mr. Red,” A man spoke as he walked by the decaying body, “I don’t think I’m gonna make it today either.”

The man with the red shirt, sitting by the boulder, remained silent and dead.

The walking man continued his path into the desert, and the body with the red shirt continued sitting in his place. “I won’t take long.” The walking man said as he left the corpse behind.

The man’s back arched forward, as if holding at its top a load. His stride was slow and his footsteps heavy, and his gaze was set to the disappearing sun.

If he continued walking, he thought, he might postpone the night, and the darkness would not come. If he could keep the sun above him, if only he could walk a little faster, then maybe he’d forget the cold, and he wouldn’t have to shiver. But the sun has always been harsh and distant, and unremorseful in its actions. Never had it waited for him, and never would it wait. The last light shined behind the mountains, drawing with it their outline, showcasing the first of the coming blackness.

“It’s okay,” He said and sighed, and he stopped with a loud thud, “Tomorrow we can try again.”

(more…)

“I came looking for you, but you weren’t home. Call me. -Mara”.

There was a bronze sky above him. The sun was showing half its face in the horizon, and the wind blew with not a hint of smell in it. It was true that he was expected to be home. He had, after all, been there every day for the last year and a half at this time. He never wondered why. It was the way of the world, the order of things, the natural state of his self when the earth sat at this angle to the sun. It dawned on him that he had never watched a sunset outside of a virtual world, or on television, or in a movie. Never had his eyes met with the star that gave them light in the hours before it disappeared. The color of the clouds shifted and a wondrous waltz took place above him.

“Place the body below the solar panels at the far end.”

He looked down again to the dark-blue bag at his side. He thought that the instructions never gave a time limit. He guessed that maybe at one point they had had one, but had been discontinued. As soon as an instruction lit up the screen on a wrist, the person whose wrist belonged to followed it. There wasn’t a need for a time limit,  everybody did their part, but on that afternoon he had yielded to the glow of the horizon and the blowing of the wind, and had delayed his actions for a few minutes. He thought it a shame that he would likely not see another sunset in a long time. What a shame, really, to never set eyes upon such sight. He considered himself lucky, and he lifted the body bag on to his shoulders and walked the rest of the way to end of the field.

The corpse inside was heavy, and his feet dug into the soft grass. The crying of cicadas drowned out the pure silence, and the fading light gave way to the darkness of the night. Who knows what creatures lurk in these hours, he thought. Who knows what comes out, away from the light and concrete of the city. He placed the body where he thought was right, below the last solar panel, under the electronics. He guessed the point was to hide it, and he did his best to do so.

“Call Mara.” The instruction read, so he did.

“Hello.” She said, laying down in bed, discontinuing her counting of imaginary sheep.

“Hey, I got your message.”

“Yeah. It was odd not finding you home. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, yeah.”

“Well listen, I need to talk to you, but I can’t right now. Is it okay if I come by tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“Okay thanks. We’ll talk then.” And so she ended the call, and she continued counting sheep.

Image created by Qauz
http://qauz.deviantart.com/

I was on my way back home. I had had a long day mining the asteroids. It wasn’t an easy day. The autopilot on my ship was taking me away when the violet planet caught my eye. We had been warned. They said it was off-limits for our safety. I had heard rumors of the surface, stories from a friend of a friend who had ventured down into the cloudy world.

One of the stories I remember most was one of a man who had landed there many years before I was born. He had been lured into that purple atmosphere by its beauty. Mesmerized by it, the man ignored the warnings. No one knew for sure what it was he experienced, but the story goes that when he came back, he came back smiling. The man never went mining again, and the people who knew him said he never spoke another word. Not one. But he always wore a smile. When I was younger it never seemed to me to be a warning story. Why be afraid of a place that would make your world a happy one? The typical reaction was that he went mad. He stopped working and he begged in the city streets, struggling to survive. But to me he was complete. Whatever it was he saw that day fulfilled him.

(more…)

At first there was a ship crossing the sea. Its captain pointed to a dot in the horizon and its crew were quick to move that way. Around the world they went, time and again. Sometimes sailing, sometimes drifting, but always in command of their own destination.

Whether their decisions brought good or not did not matter to them. In their ship their lives were encapsulated. In it, they drank, they ate, they made friends and enemies and at the end of the long days under the sun, they slept. In their quarters they lay awake some nights, thinking of the reason their lives had ended up the way they had. Some other nights they sat silent on a stool or on a bench, and, along with the rocking of their imperfect vessel, they made sense of the events they had experienced that day; But when sun came up in the morning, and the screams of the captain echoed in the halls, they knew their freedom was intact. They scurried together around the hull, and together the crew set sail again for their next adventure.

(more…)

Humans have not always lived here, near the bright center of the milky way, where the light of our stars keep the darkness away, where the light reaches all the corners of our life.

Have you seen total darkness? No, you have only seen shadows. You cannot imagine it, you cannot perceive it, and we work hard to maintain it. There are stories from our distant past, from our long gone parents, of the things out there that lurk in the voids between the stars, in the places that light has never touched.

(more…)