Light in the Dark

I have always had a fascination with Edgar Allen Poe; his short stories and poetry have a consistent air of morbidity that appeals to my darker half. It was a horror short story that got me accepted at the college I went to, and it was the narrator of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ that conversed with users as part of my artificial intelligence senior project that got me my degree.

This was written several years ago – my Edgar story.

***

Some would call the view a gift: long streams of crimson and gold meeting a horizon carved by the ridge of mountains to the west; the rolling surf, crests of white atop of a blue to make the sky jealous; miniature ships that grow to belong to this world, drawn into shore by a swath of light.

Yes, some would call this view a treasure.

I call it hell.

Truly, there is nothing worse than a cage with a view of paradise. I feel no shame in admitting my hunger for that gold, the need to catch the blood in the ski as the sun sets. I can not deny my desperate yearning to rush into the grip of the ocean.

And this desperation grows until you feel that brittle point, twisted by time and hunger into a fine knot pulled tight enough to vanish into something more than solid. You begin to realize that the one thing worse than being in a cage with a view of paradise is the hate that turns paradise into something darker, something that begs for purification.

Oh, they thought they were clever. Lock him up where he can watch that ocean that he loves so much. Let him watch the ships, the ones he used to sail, come into port under the blazing white gaze of his home. Lock him up, lock him away from the ocean that was his!

But they are not that clever by half. Ha! And soon it shall be shown just how truthful that is. When I darken their lives much as they stole mine.

I move my fingers, like threads of silver through the molasses night to touch the rim of the lighthouse cage. Fool-proof they thought. The light hidden from my touch, locked to protect those toy ships out there. And fool-proof it might be; but I am no fool. The time has come for me to show them how wrong they were.

Rolling up the cuffs of my shirt, exposing soft white to the touch of darkness. Laying bare my skin, I place the edge of the razorblade along my wrist and slit carefully. A well of crimson quickly rose and spread across the skin, destroying all semblance of what might have been truthful in flesh. Quickly – and yet carefully again – I repeat this along my other wrist.

Intent on my purpose, what pain is felt quickly passes into gleeful anticipation of my moment. I place my slit wrists over the top of the lens encasement and watch the blood drip down upon it, pooling at the top. Slowly, the blood found its ways through the cracks and into the encasement itself. I watch the blood slide down, washing over the lens. The light, that light! darkened with the lens, blood coating destroying life as the light shrank in halves, quarters, an eclipse, until…until…

…the light went out.