Light Eater

On deaf ears, I call out for my son. There is no answer, and it seems there never will be, and there never was. I’ve pleaded so long that my voice is no longer mine. The events that led me to this timeless void keep playing over in my mind. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. All I know is that my son and I were running for our lives when a flash of light came and took me.

Some kind of gang, living in the broken-down houses outside the ruins of Chicago, saw us darting across the street. We were making our way up north, following the voice on the radio to a supposedly structured and peaceful settlement. We tried to pass through undetected, but they were everywhere in the streets breaking bottles and windows and each other.

Where we came from in Maryland was an unrecognizable nightmare, but Chicago was a fresh corpse. Some of the skyscrapers were still standing on the horizon, and sunlight highlighted a Chicago skyline of sharp edges resembling the fire-bombed city of Dresden. The yards we ran through had the occasional withered tree still trying to at least stand naked. At every corner and atop every hill was not a wasteland, but a memory.

We had no time to admire the struggling life. I was looking for a place to hide my son so I could draw the murderous group away. They had come so close to grabbing my boy by the ankle and they chased us so close behind that I saw no other way. I thought if I could lose them long enough to hide him he might have a better chance of survival.

I found a car beside an off-ramp outside the neighborhood. Most cars had been so ruined there was no longer an inside. But this little green sedan had gotten by with its doors and windows still intact. Once I was sure that they could no longer see us, I hid my son on the floor of the back seat, told him not to come out until I returned—a hard command to follow for a stubborn 12-year-old boy who felt a duty to protect his mother. He protested, pulled at my mother’s heart-shaped locket that hung around my neck as he begged me not to go.

But I went, through the flooded ditch and back toward the neighborhood.

Night was falling. Their voices rising, and their lights and fires growing brighter. The wind rushed in and pulled at my body as I met them in the street. It took me so long to find them that once I did I realized we had already lost them by the time we found the little green car.

We could have kept running. There was no need for me to leave my son behind.

The mob of men and women and some children, dirty with rigid bones eating their hungry skin, and the more fortunate ones that led the pack, clothed in tattered trench coats and jeans, pointed their various bladed and rifled weapons in my direction when they saw me run out of the dark. The leaders hollered out, then all of them burst into a sprint. Their eyes glowed with blood and animal hunger.

I turned to run. And the blinding light came.

Into the void. Into the light. Into the void where there is no darkness. I say, in infinite:

“Where is my son?”

I scream the words. Whisper them aloud. Whisper them in my thoughts. Converse with them. Cry. Laugh. And sing. Hysterically thrashing.

But the white void does not answer. For as many years as one can exist, it does not answer. Years fade and movement ceases comprehension and silence consumes save for an incessant low hum.

I am not I but one with nothing and everything.

Then a voice answers the question I had long forgotten. “Your son is where you left him,” it says, soft and distant.

Lines start to appear. Perfect black squares connected on each side moving up and then down and side to side. Each square fills with bright light. The squares meet at an angle and a corner forms and the squares move in toward me and over me and under me until they form six larger squares which I now remember as…a room.

I lay naked in a bed with white sheets and a white pillow. There is no smell save for the smell of nothingness which is clean and alien. The hum from my eternal memory in the white void still rings.

My mother’s heart-shaped locket slides across my bare breast as I turn. I clench it in my hand and rub the chain together to hear anything other than the eternal ringing. Memories of the mob in Chicago, the sun, the green car, my son….

“Where am I? Where is my son?” I say to no one.

A voice says, “We told you. He is where you left him. And you are here with us now.”

I look in every part of the room for the source of the voice of which I cannot tell whether it is male or female. Then I notice there is no door or entrance of any kind.

“Is my son safe?” I ask, “who are you?”

“Whether or not your son is safe is unknown. But he is where you left him.”

I know that I am somewhere, yet with no way out or in I feel that I am nowhere, and being nowhere means I have no way to protect my son and no way to calm the rising beat of my heart and the panic in my lungs and the blood thickening in my head. I step down off the bed onto a black-lined square of white light and the color changes red as soon as it touches my skin. The red ripples out to the other squares until the entire room is glowing red and the black lines fade. I pull my foot back onto the bed and wrap my arms around my knees.

“Who are you?” I say with more authority than before.

There is a pause before the voice speaks, and when it speaks it speaks slow. “We are here. We will help you open the heart on your chest.”

I grab my locket again as if protecting it from theft. “Why?” I say, “What do you want with it?”

“What we want is nothing. Everything depends on what we want. And we believe everything and nothing is in your locket.”

Everything and nothing. What I was, or wasn’t before I woke up. But how could it be inside my little heart-shaped locket? Then again, how could anything be at all?

I loosen my grip on the chain and let the locket fall down between my breasts where it belongs. “I don’t have the key. There never was a key. I’ve never even seen the inside,” I say in defense. Then, breathing heavily through what feels like collapsing lungs, I get out of the bed and run to the wall across the room to search for a way out. The color of the room does not change this time. It stays an ominous and hateful red.

“This we know,” the voice says as I touch and bang the walls in hopes of finding an escape. “For if you had, we would not have needed to look for you…you would already be with us.”

“Let me out!” I say while I smack my palm into the red wall. “LET ME OUT!”

No answer. Silence…and a low hum.

My breath is short and sweat begins to cool my overheated body. The smell permeating from my skin is foul yet comforting as it is the only sensation in the room that is human and reminiscent of home. Even a murderous wasteland in Chicago is better than this lifeless box. And I would rather die in a green sedan beside a flooded ditch with my son than live another second here.

I slide my back down the wall until my arms can wrap around my knees. The black squares on the walls, ceiling, and floor reappear, and the red light ripples into an earthen green before the black lines fade again.

Tears fill my eyes and I hide my face. “Jackson,” I whisper, “Jackson…”

The voice returns. “There is no out except through the opening of the locket.”

Fire starts to burn again in my gut. I already told them I couldn’t open it. Yet they do not understand.

“WHO ARE YOU?” I ask again in anger, feeling more human than I had when I asked the first time. I thought that they might be some sort of advanced faction, remnants of our former government, or perhaps the remnants of a large corporation or a foreign country that was once our enemy. People like that would have good reason to hide their identity.

With no answer, I try a different question. “What’s your name, at least? Show yourself!”

Silence.

The frustration of a caged animal begins to possess me. I feel it running through my blood and I know that I would soon hold my breath until my heart stops beating if I don’t find a way out of this lifeless cube of lights. I stand up and thrash my hands into the wall again. “I TOLD YOU, THE LOCKETT DOESN’T OPEN!” I pull the chain up over my head and throw the locket to the floor. “I DON’T HAVE THE K—”

Light explodes from the locket on impact. A beam of white energy fires from the center of the locket’s heart and travels into my mouth and down my throat. I feel it all at once, burning through my veins and organs with the violent power of a dying sun. But there is no pain; pain is a signal that there is something wrong with the body, and this is a justified burning. A purification.

I hear the voice again, still without emotion or identity. “Put the locket down,” it says.

But I can’t. And I don’t want to. The light is unlike anything on Earth or in void.

My vision begins to blur as if staring at the sun until it fills every part of my eyes. The room fades and the locket with it. There is no sound, not even a low hum, but I feel my heart thumping through my chest. All I see is white.

Nothing. Everything.

Light fades and I see dotted stars pasted to the night sky. Wind chills my skin and I smell fresh life and a burning world. There is still power flowing through my veins and as the light fades more I see its source: my son, my Jackson, kneeling over me with light pouring from his mouth to mine.

Then the light is gone, completely rejected by Jackson and wholly consumed by my body. I hear his voice. “Mom!” he says, shaking my arms.

“Jackson,” I say.

And he hugs me with a force greater than the light itself.

We stand and I see that we are at the end of the street between the flooded ditch and the place where I had faced down the mob. The mob is gone, and there is no evidence of their presence from fire, speech or stench. In the distance where the sun sets a ship fly's away from the city. Neither of us had seen aircraft since the day everything fell apart.

I pull Jackson to my hip with one hand and reach for my locket with the other. But the locket is gone.