After The Lights Go Out

It all started quite normally.

We lived in a small town at the edge of the big city. A short burst of open road connected our two worlds. Always in the shadow of the city, fearful that it would one day swallow us whole.

The city was bright, loud, and alive. Its sights and sounds spilled across our country roads.
You could draw a line in the dirt where the city stopped and our world began.

Even now, knowing what happened, I can’t fathom how to explain the night the city went quiet.

Roy’s gas station was the first thing you passed when entering town. An oasis of neon in a sea of darkness. The electric buzz was so loud it drowned out the nighttime sounds. A thick haze from the dirt lot hung in the air, refusing to settle.

Roy’s sat right on that dividing line. South was the city, draped in light. North was isolation. Dust. Silence. A place to get lost.

Roy’s itself was over half a century old. Still original but harshly weathered. The pumps were ancient things with flip-number displays. Every inch of them caked in grit. Inside, coke memorabilia lined the walls beneath flickering fluorescents. Drinks were never fully cold. The floor hummed with the rattle of old refrigeration coils that hadn’t been cleaned since before I was born.

It was the last familiar place before the world changed.

That night I stood outside, leaning against one of the rusted pumps, watching the horizon. The city glow usually painted the sky a soft orange, but tonight…

Nothing.
A full blackout.

The darkness stretched so far it swallowed the skyline entirely.

I felt it before I saw it. A tremor in the air, like static crawling beneath my skin. Roy’s neon sign flickered, guttered, then steadied again. It hummed like it was straining against something.

We all knew the rumors.
We all ignored them.

Aliens. Night beings. Things that didn’t survive artificial light. Things that could only hunt in darkness.

People always joked that the only reason our town would survive was the power station sitting smack in the center of Main Street. Ugly thing. A tangle of humming wires and steel fenced off behind the diner. No one could avoid it or hide it or vote it away. It lived like a tumor in the middle of our little world.

Turned out that was our blessing.

Cities kept theirs tucked outside the edges, where they were easy targets.

I stepped away from the pump and walked toward the road, gravel crunching beneath my boots. The wind picked up, swirling dust around my ankles. The air smelled like ozone and metal.

Then I saw it.

Something moving in the sky over where the city should’ve been.

Not a plane.
Not a storm.

Something… gliding. Wide. Silent. Dark enough to swallow starlight.
A shape that bent the air around it.

The neon sign behind me sputtered again.
A shiver went down my spine.
Then the sound hit. A low hum so deep it vibrated my ribs.

Not mechanical.
Not natural.

Like something alive forcing its presence into the world.

Lights in the convenience store snapped off. The pumps died.
Roy’s neon sign fought once, twice… then surrendered.

Darkness took the edges first. It crept slowly, like ink spreading across paper. A blackout rolling toward me.

We lost the city.
We would be next.
Unless the power station held.

I stared up at the sky, breath shallow, heart pounding, wondering if the stars I saw were even stars… or if they were eyes.

The hum grew louder.

Closer.
Hungrier.

And in that crushing dark, standing in an empty lot between the ruins of one world and the trembling heart of another, I finally understood:

We weren’t just witnessing the fall of the city.

We were waiting our turn.

Blind Rage

Rage has terrible depth perception.
No one tells you that.

People warn you that revenge consumes, corrodes, hollows you out, but they never mention the way it distorts distance, how it makes every slight feel inches from your throat. How it turns a bruise into a mortal wound, a mistake into a declaration of war.

I didn’t set out to destroy him.

I wasn’t even angry at first.
Just… inconvenienced.
Annoyed.

Like he had stepped somewhere he shouldn’t, into a place inside me he never earned the right to see.

So, I pulled.
I tugged at the loose thread he left exposed.
A rumor here.
A suggestion there.
Just enough pressure to make him wobble.

I didn’t push.
Not really.

I simply removed the guardrails.
And rage, my rage, did the rest.

Funny thing is, you don’t feel yourself crossing lines.
You just feel the rightness of the burn.

The clarity.

The heat so precise it could cauterize a conscience.
By the time I realized I had gone too far, there was no one left to confess to.

Not that confession ever mattered, atonement requires regret, and regret requires doubt.

I don’t doubt what I did.
I only doubt that I needed to stop where I did.

That’s the real horror of it: you think revenge will end once you’ve taken enough from someone.

But rage doesn’t know “enough.”
It only knows all of it.

And once you see the world through that lens, once the blindness settles in, you stop caring who stands in front of you.

You will hit them anyway.
Because all you see is the shape of the original sin.

And every silhouette becomes a target when you’ve forgotten how to see the difference.

The Blinds

When I leave the blinds open at night, I swear my thoughts slip out through the slats.

Not memories. The heavy ones. The ones I never say aloud. They drift into the dark like warm breath on cold glass.

But something else slips in.
Other people’s thoughts.
Strangers passing by.

Their fears. Their whispers. Their nightmares.

They gather in the corners, waiting for me to fall asleep so they can crawl into my mind and make themselves at home.

That’s why I close the blinds tight.

Not to keep the world out.
But to keep myself in.

And because if even one of their thoughts gets in again…
I know I won’t wake up the same.

Sour Cream Pie

I should have known something was wrong when his father opened the door grinning like a man possessed and announced.

“I made forty-one sour cream pies!”

Forty-one.
Sour. Cream. Pies.

As if that was a normal human sentence.

He listed them like a deranged auctioneer, sour cream rhubarb, sour cream strawberry, sour cream banana, each flavor worse than the last. I didn’t even know sour cream belonged in pie. I was still trying to process that when I stepped inside.

My stomach soured at the thought, trying to block out the stench that was rising the deeper into the house we went. It smelt of putrid. It smelt of rancid. It smelt of things that should not go inside a human body.

The house looked like a civil war reenactment between carpets and drywall. I’m not sure who won. Carpet rolls slumped against half-demolished walls. Couches were shoved into corners like they’d been fleeing a crime. Every surface wore a thick, gray pelt of dust. It was the kind of place that made you understand tetanus on a spiritual level.

“This way,” my boyfriend said, cheerful, unfazed, a man who had clearly never smelled fresh air. He led me toward the kitchen, which was perched above a short set of stairs. The whole place was a tri-level labyrinth of horror, as if M.C. Escher had taken up hoarding.

I paused halfway down the steps.

Because underneath the pool table, an artifact so dusty it looked upholstered in despair, were baby ducks.

Not in a cute barnyard way.
In a living-room-daycare-for-feral-waterfowl way.

They quacked. They waddled. They reeked.
Little fluffy stink bombs skating across a layer of wood chips and cardboard.

Fine. Whatever. I could still recover. It was Thanksgiving, after all.

Then I stepped into the kitchen.

A small dog was standing on top of the counter, front paws sunk into the turkey carcass, happily eating straight from the roast pan. Cats slithered around the pies, all forty-one of them, licking, pawing, shedding directly into the filling.

And the pies…
Oh, the pies.

They were arranged like a shrine. Pies on the window seals, pies in the sink. Pies stacked on the dejected pool table. Dozens of pale trembling custards, each one fogged with a constellation of cat hair and something that looked disturbingly like sawdust.

 My boyfriend, the man I was hoping would whisper, “We can leave, I’m so sorry, my family is… unwell,” instead brushed aside the counter dog with the ease of a practiced professional and started making himself a plate.

A heaping one.

Turkey, dust, fur, and despair.

I must have looked horrified, because he paused only to say, with utter sincerity:

“What? It’s good here.”

And that’s when I realized:

The pies weren’t the red flag.
The ducks weren’t the red flag.
The cat-hair custard wasn’t the red flag.

He was the red flag.
And forty-one sour cream pies were my omen to run.

What Is Done

There was a time when the desert was a forest, and the sacred temple stood where the river bent like a silver spine. No one remembered how it was built. No one claimed to know who carved the towering stone or set the altar where the sun struck perfectly at dawn. The temple simply was. Older than memory, older than the towns that would later cluster around its shadow.

On the inner walls were carvings of beings not quite human:
eagle-faced guardians with wide wings and eyes like polished obsidian.

The harpies.
The Wise Ones.
Keepers of the sacred.

It was said they protected the temple.
It was said they watched over the land.
It was said they never left. Even when the forests died and the earth turned to dust.

Most believed the harpies were only a story.
A warning.
A way to keep children respectful.
The land safe.

The adults remembered.
The children did not.

It began as rebellion, always does. With boredom, bravado, and a need to prove nothing sacred existed anymore.

They gathered from every nearby town and settlement: dozens of children and young teens drawn together by whispered plans. A party. A dare. A conquest of the temple that had supposedly frightened generations before them.

They stormed the entrance, laughing as the heavy doors groaned open.

They lit torches.
Played music.
Danced where offerings once lay.

Carved their initials into stone older than sand.
Their voices echoed through the chamber, sharp and thoughtless.

And beneath the floor, something stirred.

The harpies had not left.
They had only slept.

Deep under the dirt floor, they rose.

Dust fell from ancient feathers.
Talons scraped stone.
Bones long still remembered movement.

Eyes opened like black suns returning to the sky.

The children didn’t hear the awakening.
They didn’t notice the doors closing.
They didn’t see the harpies barring the entrance with the strength of creatures carved from legend.

But the adults did.

Parents ran from every corner of the desert, pounding on the sealed doors, screaming at the carvings, at the stone, at the legend they’d prayed was only myth.

“Open! OPEN!”
“Let them out!”
“Please—please—they’re only children!”

The harpies answered with a single chant, a voice like stone grinding against stone:

“What is done cannot be undone.”

The ground trembled.
The sky shuttered.
The walls groaned like something living.

Inside, the children screamed as torches fell and dust rained from the ceiling.

The adults howled.

The harpies did not open the doors.

Some holiness, once broken, cannot be mended.

The temple collapsed inward with a roar that shook the bones of the earth.
Stone shattered.
Sand swallowed everything.

And then. Silence.

When the dust finally settled, there was nothing left.

No temple.
No doors.
No bodies.

No trace of anything that had once stood holy.
Only the legend remained.
A whisper on the wind: “What is done cannot be undone.”

And beneath the earth, the harpies slept again. Waiting for the day the land might once more be worthy of sacred things and their protection.

Sweet Relief

On the outside, I am sweetness.
Soft smiles. Warm eyes. Immaculate manners.

I apologize when other people bump into me.
I hold the door open for people who don’t say thank you.
I send thank-you notes for thank-you notes.

People think I’m an angel.
And I let them.

Because the truth lives behind my teeth.

Inside my chest is a swarm, every insult I’ve swallowed for the sake of being “nice,” every razor-edged truth I choked down because polite people don’t speak like that. Every judgment I never voiced. Every sharp observation that would have cut someone to the bone.

I’ve held them all.
For years.

They twist. They press. They writhe.
They whisper:

Say it.

Tell her she’s insufferable.
Tell him he’s pathetic.
Tell them you see through every lie.
Tell them you are smarter than all of them combined.

But I breathe, smile, and say,
“Oh, no worries at all.”
Or “Does that make sense?”
Pretending I don’t understand.

My venom simmers behind a perfect, pleasant smile.

Until tonight.

It starts with a tightness, right under the sternum. Like something stretching after a long sleep. Then a crack. A pop. A slow unfastening.

My ribcage opens.
Not metaphorically.
Physically.

It opens.

The first thing to crawl out is small, skittering, made of letters shaped like legs. It peels itself from my heart and drops to the floor, leaving a trail of punctuation behind it.

Then another.
And another.

My unsaid things spill into the room:

Snakes made from insults.
Insects spun from impatience.
Thin, sharp creatures stitched from judgments I never voiced.
Small, mean animals formed from every truth I pretended I didn’t know.

They swarm across my hardwood floors, sliding under baseboards, slipping between the cracks in the walls.

They disappear into the night to haunt the people who earned them.

And I let them go.

There is no horror.
No guilt.

Only relief.

The weight in my chest vanishes.
I feel light.
Almost holy.
Like confession, but honest for the first time.

Tomorrow, people will wake uneasy.
They will feel watched.
Judged.
Exposed.

They will second-guess themselves.
Flinch at their reflections.
Be conscious of their own incompetencies.

They’ll hear soft, crawling things in the corners of their rooms whispering the truths I never said aloud.

And none of it will come back to me.

I will still smile.
Still hold the door.
Still tilt my head just right when I’m listening.

People will still call me “kind,”
“sweet,”
“such a lovely person.”

And they’ll never suspect:

All the ugliness I hid so well is finally free.
And the world is softer for me having let it out and crueler for everyone else.

What sweet relief.

When Darkness Dines

The room was breathtaking, rich tapestries draped along stone walls, a fire snapping in the great hearth, candlelight quivering like it feared the dark. Something unspoken curled in the corners, a soft, forbidden tension. The masks didn’t help; jeweled things with feathers and lacquered smiles, hiding faces but not intentions. Silk rustled. Corsets creaked. Perfume and smoke mingled in the air like gossip.

We were told the game was simple.
One rule, whispered to me as my mask was tied.
Once you lift your glass, you must never let it touch the table again.

I thought it was harmless. A charming superstition. A silly custom for a silly party.

The night glittered with conversation, flirtations, laughter, soft touches, secrets passing like contraband. When the host raised his cup for a toast, we all followed. Crystal chimed in a chorus. My drink was warm, thick, sweet in a way that lingered too long on the tongue.

We cheered. We turned. We moved.
And without thinking,
I set my glass down.

A tiny sound, barely a click.
But it split the evening in two.

The room stilled.
A collective inhale.

Silks froze mid-sway. Masks pivoted toward me like flowers tracking the sun.

Heat climbed my cheeks. I snatched the glass back up, desperate to undo the mistake, and again without thinking, I took another sip.

This time the gasp was sharp. Almost delighted.

My head swam. Thoughts thickened, slow as syrup. The floor shifted under my heels. A warm trickle slid from my nose; I brushed it away and my fingers came back red.

Blood dotted my glove.
Blood dripped down my bodice.
Blood bloomed like a dark flower across the front of my gown.

The masked faces around me, white-eyed, gleaming, watched with hungry silence.

My chest tightened. The candlelight thinned. My vision folded in at the edges like dying paper.

I staggered toward the next room, but the doorway drifted farther and farther. My legs gave out. I collapsed onto the ballroom floor, skirts fanning around me like a fallen curtain.

Their masks hovered above me, floating, inhuman, unmoving. Their breaths were low, animal, anticipatory.

“It was just a game,” I whispered.

Something shifted in the shadows.

A soft rustling rose behind the masks, not from them, but from the dark pooled along the walls. The candlelight faltered. A heavy scent crept through the air, damp and old, like earth turned too deep.

The masks did not move.

They watched as the darkness leaned in, slow, deliberate, finally allowed to dine.