Through Glass(39)

I looked at the red, the black. Not knowing whose blood was whose. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter anymore.

I pressed my fingers to the glass and they moved quickly, smearing blood against the glass to form the words I had been fighting against for two years, the words that were now all I had left.





I AM ALONE


Even through the promises, it was all there was left.

If only I wanted it to end this way, yet now I knew, there was something bigger out there.

The end of the blackness. The light had shown me that.

I had chosen to hide, but now I was choosing to run. To fight. Even if it ended in my death; at least with death, I wouldn’t be alone. Not yet though.

I knew I couldn’t be the only one left; there had to be others. Others that had found light, others that had fought. I would search to my last day until I found them. Until I could end the black. Until Cohen’s death was no longer just one of the many useless murders.

I grabbed the canvas and shoved it into my backpack, placing the last piece that Cohen had ever painted inside. Keeping the last piece of beauty he had given me close and with me forever.

I placed the canvas next to my clothes before moving to the dresser and filling my backpack right to the brink with brown packets before grabbing the batteries that Cohen had left on the dresser.

I replaced the batteries quickly with a sad smile pulling at my lips as the light burned brightly once the power source had been replaced. It was my weapon. It would keep me safe, for the time being anyway. I wasn’t sure how long the batteries would last.

I took one last look at the room I had destroyed, at the future that Cohen had envisioned for us. One look and then I was gone; down the stairs and into the darkness of the outside, my hand firmly curled around the bed rail.

I stood in the grass between our homes, staring at the black sky that Cohen had disappeared into only minutes before. My jaw tightened as I stared, the weakness in my body meaning nothing.

I held on my body a memory from each person that the darkness had taken away. They clung to my skin at the same time they hid in my heart.

I held in my hand a weapon which, if I was lucky, would help me find a way to fight back.

I took a deep breath, my chest shaking in fear as the last of the sadness left me and my jaw tightened as determination took its place.

I looked into the expanse of black sky that stretched between our houses, the inky color oppressive against me. It was there that the monster had taken Cohen away from me. He had disappeared into the sky right there, but I wouldn’t go that way, not yet. There had to be others and if movies had taught me anything, they would be in the center of town.

I turned around, my back facing the blackness that had swallowed Cohen, away from the last thing that I loved. I moved forward into the blackness of the city before me, into the world which had been taken from me. Into what could only be my end.

“Good-bye Cohen.”





The darkness was everywhere. It touched the once beautiful world I had lived in, seeping its poison into it and sucking the life and beauty from it.

I could see the shadow of color, the faded yellow of houses, the dark white of picket fences, a deep red of an upturned sedan. Even with the light strapped to my back the colors were faded in the darkness, swallowed by the black and my mind was unable to recall what the color had once been.

Green trees that had once stretched to the sky with heavy laden limbs were now cut through the grey of air above me in jagged shadows that stretched and elongated as the protective light shone on them. Skeletons of houses loomed around me, their broken faces screaming in pain from the torture that they had had to endure and the murders they’d had to witness.

Everything around me was bathed in the death of the dim light we had been left with. The life sucked out of it and the beauty stripped from it. The world was cast in shadow, but I had the light that served as my shield, which elongated those shadows into deathly fingers that only made the world look more forgotten.

Everything was dead, all life had been stripped away to open a wound on a now lonely planet.

I didn’t know how else to explain it.

There was no life here, not anymore. The endless stream of perfectly round piles of ash promised me that. I silently stepped around them, careful not to disturb the only reminder that people had once existed; the reminder of what may be in store for me.

Hundreds of them littered the ground around me; they pockmarked the cracked asphalt of the street and clustered around houses, broken cars, and street signs. Circles of ended life, of forgotten dreams. People that the Ulama had ended, that they had taken away. Just like Cohen.

I didn’t want to look. I willed myself to look away, but I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering. I couldn’t stop the fear and anger from mixing together.

I had gone this way on purpose, turning my back on the black stretch of sky that Cohen had moved into while dutifully keeping away from the skate park where my family had left me forever. I had walked toward downtown in the hope that I would find refugees—others who had found the secret of the light. Deep inside, I hoped that if I walked long enough I would find a sun. Yet seeing this now, I was beginning to wonder if either were a possibility.

I walked down the street, my body dragging in exhaustion as I stubbornly moved myself forward. Every inch of my body ached from the exertion of walking, from carrying the heavy backpack. It all combined in a dull throb that covered every inch of me. I did my best to ignore it, but I already knew how useless it was.