Hannah/saying/things

“This pasta looks alive,” I said. “Do you think this pasta is alive?”

Noah, face pressed close to mine, both of us within steaming-distance of the silver pot on the electric stove, said: “Uh… what?” 

Noah and I were both pretty high. 

“We can’t eat this if it’s alive,” I said. 

He didn’t seem to grasp the severity of the situation, staring aimlessly into the pot and swaying a little bit in place. 

I stood. 

“Jeez,” said Noah, back also straightening, though slowly, “Well, shit, I don’t know, dude.” 

I kept blinking to try to get the image out of my mind. It was dark in the kitchen, only a late-afternoon light coming in through the window. 

I couldn’t really explain what it is that I was seeing. The angel-hair noodles really did look like hair, and they were gathered up together in a thick, blobby mass like a hunk of pale flesh. I thought at any moment an eye might blink open out from the center of it, that a tooth might float up. 

It was probably fine. I had this problem with getting kind of paranoid when I got pretty high and I was pretty high right now. This was not outside of the normal range of thoughts I sometimes had. 

“Okay, well, you know, let’s mess with it.”

“What do you mean?”

Noah sighed heavily. He leaned away from me then, eyes scanning the counter, and finally grabbed a wooden spoon.

“Mess with it,” he said, lowering the spoon beneath the surface of the bubbling water. “So we can see if it’s alive.”

I recoiled as he stabbed at the writhing beige mass, but the way the clump of stretchy, thin noodles drifted through the water was natural and organic, in accordance with the movement of the spoon, not like something living, just like something malleable. 

“I think we’re good, dude,” Noah said, removing the spoon from the pot. “Unless you’re still feeling weird about it?” 

What if, I was thinking, What if this is what it looks like being alive, just not in a way we can understand, what if everything is alive only it’s smaller than us or too different so we don’t think about it, what if we are about to kill something conscious and eat it and we don’t even know it, or we know it and worse yet we just don’t care?

I didn’t want to say any of this. 

Calm down, I told myself. Cool it. 

“Okay,” I said, pretending I felt sure. “I’m, uh, ready.”

“Hell yeah,” Noah said. “Fuck, let’s just drain this thing. I’m hungry as fuck.” 

I liked smoking with Noah. A lot of times after our shift at the supermarket we’d share a joint in the alleyway out back, sometimes before. He brought the weed or I would. 

We’d smoke it together and then start smiling, and he’d be talking, and I’d stop worrying about what I was gonna say, so I’d actually talk back, and then it was back to work, or parting our separate ways to go home. This was the first time I asked if he’d come over to my apartment, and he had said yes. 

The sun was forgettable at the edge of the sky, replaced by orange and red and those other colors. We were on my back porch sitting on a couple of dirty, white, plastic adirondack chairs. You could hear the cicadas whining at you from all around. That was how summer sounded.  

Noah took a long drag on the joint and the cherry blazed red. He held it in his chest for some time before letting it out in one grand stream, which started thin and controlled then blossomed into the too-warm air.  

He coughed a little. “Shit. Where did you get this stuff?”

My head was a bit swimmy as he was passing me the joint back but I hit it anyway, long and hard like he had done. 

I started coughing so bad I thought I might throw up. 

“Hey, it’s all good, man,” Noah said, taking the joint back and hitting it again. 

“Dispensary,” I coughed out eventually. 

“Which one?”

“I don’t remember.”

Sometimes there were weird silences between us. I tried not to let them bother me. There were weird silences between me and everybody most of the time. Noah was the first friend I had made in quite some time and even then we weren’t really that close. I didn’t want it to be like that but didn’t know how to make it different. I had hoped that maybe tonight I could work on that. 

“So,” I said, as we kept passing the joint back and forth between us. I hoped my head wouldn’t get too far gone, but I didn’t want to stop smoking. “Uh, how have you been feeling lately?” 

Noah looked over at me dubiously. “How have I been feeling?” 

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging, “You know, uh, I guess, how have you been?” 

He took a deep breath, looking out at the sky, then let it out, let it sputter between his lips so that it made a sound. 

“Well, shit,” he said. “Okay, I guess. Work makes me want to kill myself, but you knew that.” 

I hadn’t known that. I guess I probably could have guessed it. Was that supposed to be hyperbolic? I didn’t want to ask. 

“We have fun sometimes,” I said. “Remember when we hijacked the loudspeaker?”

One day, when it was slow and we were a little high and really didn’t want to work, we had taken one of the wireless microphones away from the checkout aisles and hidden out behind the store playing Gangnam Style into it over and over and laughing so, so hard. It had been just me and him doing it together. 

“Ha, yeah,” he said. “I’ve never seen Ryan so pissed off.” 

There was another silence again and I was trying to think of what to say. I didn’t think he’d want to keep talking about work, and I didn’t want to ask him more about what he said, but I couldn’t think of any other topics. He handed me the joint so I hit it. 

“You ever wonder why bad things happen to good people?” 

I was surprised to hear Noah ask this. He wasn’t usually the “high thoughts” type of stoner. I guess maybe I kinda-sorta was, but I usually didn’t say any of them out loud. 

“Sure,” I said. I wanted to keep the conversation going in this direction. I mean this really was pretty surprising for Noah. “Do you have any particular situation in mind, or just… generally…?”

“I don’t know, man,” Noah shook his head, shuffling his feet, looking down at them. He kept shaking his head. “I don’t know. All this shit in the news. People die all the time. They kill each other or get killed by something and most of the time there just isn’t any reason for it.” 

Noah and I hadn’t talked about anything even close to this before. 

“Those people have lives and stuff, you know?” Noah continued. “I don’t know. Just seems like a waste.”

I took a long drag off of the joint and started coughing, badly, passing it back over to him while he looked at me in vague concern. I waved my hand at him.

“Like…” Noah took a good long hit as well, and the rest of his words came out tangled in gray. “How can there be a God that just allows shit like this to happen? Does that mean it’s supposed to happen? That’s fucked up, dude. So fucked up.” 

He passed it back to me and I hit it again, which wasn’t a great idea, because it seemed an actual conversation was now actually starting, and I didn’t want to fuck it up. 

“You believe in God?” I asked. 

Noah took another hit. Then so did I. Higher, higher. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something big. I don’t know. Bigger than us.” 

I nodded, just bobbing my head, thinking Sure, sure, sure. 

“You think it cares about us?” I asked. 

Noah shrugged. “That’s what people say, right?” 

I felt good about how this conversation was going. I had thought about this sort of thing quite a bit and was excited to talk to him about something I knew how to talk about. 

“Well, it’s possible our understanding of God isn’t accurate at all,” I said. “Just because there might be something bigger out there doesn’t mean it’s anything that loves us, or even really knows we exist, and it’s possible that–” 

“Hey, ow!” 

Noah jumped out of his chair, he had slapped the back of his forearm with his hand. 

“Damn it,” he said. “Jeez, that hurt.” 

I stood with him, though I wasn’t sure why I did it or what difference it would make, so then I felt kind of stupid to be standing, but too self-conscious to sit back down.  

“I don’t think I got it,” he said. “Hang on…”

Noah and I both scanned the ground for the bug that had bit him. I was the one who found it: a mosquito, now with one broken wing, its spindly body twitching against the rough, white pavement inches from Noah’s bare feet. 

“There,” I said, pointing, then didn’t know why I did. There wasn’t any reason to go after it, now: its wings were broken, it wouldn’t hurt either of us. I think I was feeling sensitive and sentimental, high as I was, and I just didn’t really want to see any death right now.

“Oh, fuck that,” Noah said, then stooped down. 

It was a small second of watching the almost-dead thing, maybe even already dead but still twitching. I know human bodies do that sometimes after they die. Nerves still firing off and that sort of thing. 

“Wait–”

 Then, Noah brought down his bare fist, flattening and killing the bug. 

I didn’t want to look at it afterwards so I looked away as he wiped his hands off on his shorts. I think its guts kind of smeared across the fabric. 

Noah slumped back down into his chair with a heavy sigh. 

I saw another mosquito whizzing through the air beside him, making strange loops, arcing downwards. I kind of hoped he didn’t see it. I felt bad. 

“Hey,” Noah asked, evidently not having noticed the other bug. It twittered away. “You wanna relight that thing?”

I still had our joint pinched between my fingers, but I had pinched it too tightly along the middle, where the weed was. It was pretty bent now. 

“I’ll try,” I said, and tried, but even though it would light I couldn’t pull any smoke through. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I kinda broke it.”

“That’s okay,” Noah said. “I’ll roll us another one.” 

Turns out we had forgotten about the pasta once we made it. It had gone cold on the coffee table. Noah didn’t seem to mind, so we ate it anyway. 

I was a little embarrassed about the state of my apartment. I had decided to invite him over last-minute and so it wasn’t especially clean. I was living alone at the time and didn’t have a girlfriend or anything so it was getting kind of bleak in there. There wasn’t an overhead light in the living room, just a standing lamp and another one beside the television, and the lightbulb in the standing lamp had gone out, so it was dark most of the time. I just turned on the TV to an old sitcom I have heard that lots of people like and hoped he wouldn’t ask me to turn on more lights. 

Noah pulled out my rolling tray and started stuffing a pre-roll with flower and I started eating.

As I was chewing it up, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mosquito, and about the pasta. 

I tried to convince myself that the noodles must have been a normal texture when they were warm, not this cold, slimy, fish-like thing that they were now. I started to feel really bad as I kept shovelling spoonfuls in. 

And it must not have cooked through, because there was something crunchy about it, and I was still thinking about the mosquito, and started imagining its delicate little legs had gotten twisted up in this dinner somehow, that I was breaking its hard shell again and again with my teeth, swallowing its strange eyes, its antennae, the basket of blood on its back. I had to stop in the middle of twisting another bite around my fork because I just felt too weird about it, and pushed it towards the end of the coffee table, and moved a stack of books in front of it so I didn’t have to look at it.

I was just high and being unreasonable. Obviously this pasta was not alive. And anyway, even if it was – like – somehow alive, it probably wasn’t conscious, or anything – it was still something people ate all the time, so it must be okay to eat it. The food chain, or whatever. 

Noah set the joint down and took his first bite and recoiled. 

“Kind of tastes shitty,” Noah remarked. “Do you have any parmesan?”

“No,” I said. There might have been some in my fridge but it had probably gone bad. “I have nutritional yeast, though.” 

That stuff wasn’t perishable. Well, I didn’t think it was.

“What the hell is that?” Noah set his bowl of pasta down and lifted the latest joint, not expecting me to answer. “Hey, pass me the lighter.” 

Truth is, I was pretty high already, and past the point where I could let words slip out of me bravely. I had wandered into the mental territory of no restraint, so I wasn’t totally aware of what I was thinking, and then what I was saying, and as a result, I was already afraid of everything I was going to say before I said it. Still, he wanted to keep smoking, so I would keep smoking, too. I passed him the lighter. 

It was as he was lighting the thing that the TV went out. All at once, it was completely quiet and also completely dark. 

“Fuck!” Noah cried out. I heard him relight the joint anyway. Seconds later, through smoke-plume, “What happened?” 

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said, and stood to light the lamp next to the now-dark television. 

I twisted the knob on the lightbulb a couple of times but it didn’t even try to turn on. I had probably been ignoring its flickering for about a week or so, and so this was probably my fault. 

“I think the power’s gone out,” I said. 

“Damn,” he said. “Sorry, man. You want to go back outside?”

“You don’t want to leave?” I asked. 

He raised his hand in front of his face, inspecting the joint held loftily between his thumb and forefinger, which I could now see as my eyes were adjusting to the low light. 

“We’ve still gotta smoke this thing,” he said. 

Since it was now dark everywhere, we walked to a nearby park. We walked in the middle of the street because no one drove around this neighborhood at this time. That’s when I got the feeling that someone was watching us. 

I kept jumping, glancing over my shoulder. I wanted to stop myself, but the thing about these kinds of feelings is that they don’t feel like feelings, they feel like fact. You just know it in your body when someone is staring at you. 

So I kept looking and seeing nothing: only the neighborhood street, houses and courtyard apartments on either side, lines of cars facing both directions, all of it aglow in the stark-white floodlights of the LED streetlamps. I couldn’t find anything living to which I could attribute this delusion of unsafety, not even any animals, not even anyone standing innocently on their front porches. 

Probably it was just a side effect of being as high as I was. Man, I was really on edge. I couldn’t let Noah know about that. 

My skin prickled as I forced myself to keep my eyes ahead of me. We were a block from the park. When I had last looked, less than a minute ago, I saw nothing in the darkness as far as I could discern, but the feeling lingered, and I told myself I must have missed a shape somewhere in all that dark, so I looked again, and kept looking, far out past where the LEDs fell, peering as far as I could to map the distant nighttime, to put this thing down for good. Turning, I tripped over my own feet and knocked into Noah beside me. 

“You good, dude?” he chuckled, pushing back at my body slightly to steady me. 

I wanted to tell him what I was thinking about but I also wanted him to still like me and want to hang out with me. 

“Totally,” I said, and kept walking. 

There was a great big weeping willow in the park beside a small pond and we sat in the grass underneath its hanging flowers. The cicadas were singing so it didn’t matter if we were quiet. 

When we were halfway through this joint I started to feel like I was going to fall all the way into the bark of the tree behind me. I might not be able to extricate myself from it once it was time to go. I raised my hand to gather the strength to tell Noah about this but he ended up handing me the joint back and I took another hit off of it. 

“I think I want to work in an office,” Noah said, breaking a silence that had been going on for I don’t know how long. “I’m tired of talking to people all the time.” 

I should have expected this kind of thing and yet it still made my stomach sink. He was far from the first person to have left this job since I’d started here six months ago. No one wanted to be at the supermarket forever. 

“You’ll still have to talk to people at an office,” I said. 

“Yeah,” he said. “People with degrees. Not the moronic shitheads we get every day.” 

“I guess,” I said. “Seems kind of soulless, though.”

The supermarket was soulless too. We were always having to deny people’s refunds and refuse discounts to young women with babies and give them to police officers instead and throw away perfectly good produce and padlock the dumpster so nobody could have even the spoiled stuff for free. 

“I’ll take soulless for a salary and weekends off,” he laughed mirthlessly. 

There wasn’t much I could say about that.  

“You won’t be able to get high at the office,” I said instead. 

“That’s what you think,” he replied. “Besides, maybe it’d be good to take a break. I don’t want to completely rot my brain, end up someone else’s dumbass customer.” 

I took several hits when it was my turn because I wanted to get higher, higher, higher. I really felt like I was melting into the tree. I was boomeranging wildly from restrained back to free back to discomforting back to brave and I was going to keep pushing it until I stayed where I wanted to be, spun out impossibly into the sky, until this wasn’t bothering me anymore, until I was okay with the reality that I was going to be alone again. Hit hit hit, all of it whirlpooling out of me. 

“I don’t know, though,” Noah said eventually. “Maybe it is a dumb idea. Don’t know what I’d even wear to an interview. Do people actually wear ties?” 

I didn’t know. “It couldn’t hurt to get one.”

Noah shook his head. “Maybe it isn’t worth it.” 

I felt bad, I think, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, not really, so I figured I could just start talking and then figure the rest of it out. “Well, maybe you could–” 

A branch snapped somewhere nearby and we both jumped. 

I could hear my heart pounding, its sound unnaturally loud, and realized that, like it had in the living room when the TV went off, it had gone completely silent, so silent that it became its own kind of loud thing ringing in my ears. 

Where were the cicadas? 

“Hey,” Noah said, quietly, nudging me with his shoulder. “You okay, dude?” 

I shook my head. Probably not but I didn’t want to say that. My chest was feeling kind of tight and I just kept getting higher as all those hits I had just taken started stumbling into one another.  

“I think I’m too high,” I said, feeling hotter under my skin. “I’m…”

Hearing things, I think I’m seeing things. Don’t say that shit. That never goes over well. 

“I think I’m too high,” I said again. I wanted to take another hit. 

A sudden wind brushed through the tree branches, casting them aside, and I jumped. 

“Yeah, I think you are,” Noah said. “Okay, well, let’s… uh…” 

It was then that I got that feeling again, the absolute certainty that we weren’t alone. Before, it had been an amorphous thing, something indistinct I was searching for in the dark behind me, had no idea where exactly it was coming from. 

It wasn’t like that now. 

Whatever was watching us was closer, but I couldn’t tell where. The limbs of the weeping willow made a sort of beaded curtain all around us, you could kind of see through it, but not quite. Someone might have been standing just outside the canopy, but they also might not.

I started shaking my head. I mean my throat was really beginning to close up. My skin was tingling. I had never had this reaction to weed before – the paranoia, maybe, but not this physical stuff, and the paranoia had never been this bad. I honestly really felt sure that something was happening. I was too high and yet I didn’t really even feel high anymore, not in the way that weed makes you high. I felt more as if I’d just snorted coke and then adderall in quick succession and every little thing was occurring to me. I could have snatched a gnat out of the air with my bare hands. 

I was really starting to freak out and I kind of wanted some help. I looked over at Noah and thought about trying to explain what was happening inside of me so that he could help me. I thought, I think it’s okay to want to share this with a friend, and we were becoming friends, that’s what we were moving towards, so it would probably be okay, it would probably be for the best and very good, actually, and maybe even the right thing to do, or at the very least acceptable, at the very least something understandable that someone else who was more socially adept than I was would have also done.

Only Noah looked non-plussed, just high, gazing out aimlessly, kind of swaying. So I remembered myself.  

Of course Noah wasn’t noticing any of it because Noah wasn’t fucking crazy. Noah seemed fine, so I would have to be fine.  

“I’m good,” I tried saying. “I’m just being–” 

“Dude,” Noah jumped, gripping onto my bicep. “Dude, what is that?” 

“What?” I asked, looking at him, and his face was pale, then looking all around us. Grass, bark, leaves, flowers – that was it. “What? What is what?” 

Noah pointed. 

You just knew when somebody was looking at you and you just knew when somebody was nearby, even if you couldn’t see them. Noah was pointing at the branches to my right and I looked at where he was pointing and then I felt the wrongness concentrated. In the place where I was now certain that somebody was standing, the pendulous branches of the weeping willow had begun to move. 

Slowly, as naturally as wind, and yet certainly not wind, one long tendril was pushed up and to the side, then those beside it, as if a hand was parting the leaves, only there was no hand. As if someone was standing just outside and parting the leaves to peek inside at us. Only there was no one standing just outside. Only no one made any move to come in beyond moving those leaves. For a moment, it was just this: the curtain parted, Noah and I completely silent, watching this thing that was nothing — this thing that was nothing watching us. 

All was still and we were looked-at.

Then, this not-hand, this not-nothing, began to move. As it moved, the hanging branches behind it fell in its wake, a hand running through hair, through shifting water. This wave circled us slowly, from my right to directly in front of us, then beyond. 

Noah grabbed onto my shoulders and I clutched back at him.

We watched as the nothing-and-certainly-not-hand continued its arc around the tree, to our left, then back where we could not see it, somewhere behind us, and even the branches were making no sound. I could hear nothing but Noah’s stuttered breathing, and I couldn’t even turn to look around the tree behind us, I was so petrified. Then the cascade was making its way back where I could see it, stopping directly in front of us. 

It held for a moment, the branches completely frozen, as if someone really was holding them up. It was not the wind. It was, seemingly, not a person. There was only darkness. And yet I swore, somehow, could I see—? 

Then the thing – this tension, this not-hand, whatever had just circled us – deflated, or so it seemed, letting the flowers fall. 

When the sound of the cicadas returned it sounded like screaming. 

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Noah hissed, and I gripped onto his hand without thinking about it, and we got the fuck out of there. 

We were silent as we walked. Well it started out walking. I didn’t have to pretend now that I didn’t know someone, something was watching us, following us, I didn’t have to say anything at all for one of us to pick up our pace, the other following, I don’t know who then who, but I knew the way, Noah didn’t, but he didn’t seem to care, only seemed to need to run. 

It occurred to me all at once I had never seen Noah scared before, not even anything close. 

I had to grab his arm once it was time to turn onto our street. 

“Four more blocks,” I told him, though I wasn’t clear enough in my head to remember for sure. 

He didn’t respond, just nodded, eyes darting around and practically twitching, took off running again, almost leaving me behind. 

This thing was following all the while and we both knew it. It was walking and was letting us run. It could catch up with ease at any time and I think we both knew it, or I did. I don’t think I’ve ever run faster or felt time move beneath me so slow. 

We reached my block. I could see my apartment building in the ugly streetlamp spotlight, and then that spotlight went out. 

So did the one directly across the street from it. Then, in pairs, each streetlight leading towards us went out, and the darkness got bigger. 

I held my arm out in front of Noah as I skidded to a stop and, with some force, he ran into it. 

“Hey!” He said. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Let me go.”

“Noah,” I said then. “Look.”

The streetlamps on either side of us stayed lit. You could call it a mercy but I think it was only so that we could see this thing that was happening as it happened. 

The darkness was behind us, before us, over us. I felt watched again, seen – eyes on me coming from everywhere. Again it was silent, I could hear how silent it was. I could hear Noah huffing out breaths beside me but only barely over the roar of all that silence. I could feel the eyes, and what’s more, I could see, I could see…

“What?” Noah asked, exasperated, and I realised he did not see it, so I reached out to grab his jaw with my hand and moved it myself so that he was looking up and seeing the same thing that I was. 

In the sky, or where the sky should have been, there was a different darkness than any I’ve known before. The darkness was a living thing, heavy and obstinate, and it was reaching for us. 

In the sky, or where the sky should have been, I could see the Darkness stretching out its many dark arms, furling and unfurling, searching, lower, lower still. From the sky and made of it, away from that sky and towards us it came. They were only arms and even then not really arms and yet they were looking at me with their many eyes, they were opening their mouths, the whole time they were reaching, lower and lower, and for the first time in all of this time I had been alive I thought that maybe it was possible that I might die, it might even happen now, and I wasn’t ready, for all my whining and complaining about things, I wasn’t ready to die, I didn’t want to. 

God, I thought looking up in something like awe at this thing which was nothing: God, I thought, and kept thinking, God. 

The arms stretched lower, like tentacles, like tree branches, like angel hair, grazing just above our heads. The streetlamp to my right flickered. 

Noah grabbed my hand in his. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t be a fucking pussy.”

Those last two lights went out, and I held onto his hand, and into the darkness we ran. 

We barreled through the front door of my apartment, and Noah made a beeline for the pull chain on the stand-up lamp, and it didn’t do anything. I knew it wouldn’t. He went for the other lamp, and that didn’t turn on, either. He tried the TV, and even that wasn’t working. I must have forgotten to pay the electricity bill again. This was why I never had people over. I couldn’t believe he was seeing this, he’d never want to speak to me again, much less come back over. 

“You don’t have to stay over here,” I said meekly. 

“What the hell, are you kidding?” he whipped around towards me. He was pulling up couch cushions, running his hands across the coffee table in the dark, looking for something. “You think I want to walk home right now? I’m high as shit, man, I’m fucked up, I’m so fucking fucked up. Where the fuck is the lighter?”  

I had it in my pocket. I dug it out for him. “Here.” 

As I was handing it to him, we heard a thump at the front door. Mine was a direct-entry apartment. My door was the only thing standing between us and – well – and – 

“Fuck,” Noah muttered under his breath. 

He glanced around the place and I did too. What options did we have? There was no upstairs, only my bedroom and the kitchen and the bathroom. The bathroom was so small and had no window. In my room the windows were painted shut, we’d still be trapped. The back door was in the kitchen. 

“Okay, come on,” Noah said, leading me there, apparently coming to the same conclusion. 

We had only made it halfway into the kitchen when there was another, louder thump, this time at the back door. 

No, not only at the back – it was still coming from the front door, too. We heard it again and again. It was rattling the window frames. I could see the glass wobbling. It was as if there were large fists, battering rams, pounding against the glass, the wood, the walls, but I couldn’t see anything, not in the dark. 

The thumping stopped for a moment and again I felt the overwhelming sensation of that complete and total silence. No bugs. It was no comfort, only absence, so quiet it felt loud. 

“What’s going on?” I whispered, my voice trembling, unable to hide my fear or act as if this wasn’t unravelling me anymore. “What is that thing – I mean, did you see – this is something, isn’t it, I’m not just –” 

“Stop,” Noah hissed back, shaking his head, looking right at me. Our voices were muffled amidst this heavy not-right quiet. “Stop freaking out. We’re just imagining things because we’re high. Okay? There isn’t anything here with us. Why would anything be here with us? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.” 

“No,” I said, shaking my head. I disagreed with him. I could feel it and I knew he could feel it too. 

God, I thought, and it felt right to think it, like I was understanding my place in things in a way that Noah was not. God. 

Suddenly, that unnatural silence was shattered shrilly by the sound of splintering glass, which might have been a window, or might have been one of those useless lightbulbs. 

Something deep and Dark settled down inside of me and I backed up towards the fridge, into Noah, and he didn’t try to move me away from him. 

“It’s in here,” I whispered. 

God, I thought again, and the thought made me feel like an animal, a small animal, very small, so small it could fit in your hand, against the pad of your finger, between two fingers, spread like jelly against the wall, against the ground. 

Noah didn’t respond. 

There was a sound coming from the living room. It was like breathing only bigger. Like suction, like a black hole. 

Then I saw it, that Different-Darkness, like the different-silence, huddling in the doorframe. There was nothing beyond it, nothing at all. Only this. It should have looked smaller, contained between four planes. And yet there it was, so close to us, and it seemed so big, and I felt so small. 

Inside of me it felt very very cold, in my stomach, in my chest, and yet my skin felt warm, searing hot, and I felt pulled towards this thing, like suction, like a black hole. 

God. 

“I need – fuck, this lighter isn’t doing fucking anything –” 

Noah kept flicking it on, though the flame it made was so small it didn’t matter. We were backing further into the corner, towards the door. I thought about trying to rattle the handle but knew it was no use. I could feel it on the outside, behind me, as sure as I felt it in here, ahead. 

The Darkness grew. Its tendrils breezed into the room itself. They swallowed parts of the ceiling, parts of my cabinets. 

God. 

“This isn’t real,” Noah said, his voice breaking a little. He kept flicking the lighter and was holding it out in front of him like it could save him. 

I could hear it breathing in the way that I could not hear anything, I could see it in the way I stared into it and there was nothing there, nothing, nothing, nothing, absolute nothing, a nothing so empty it was full, nothing, nothing – 

“I think it is,” I whispered back, so quietly I didn’t even know if he could hear me. 

God, God, God –

The Darkness was sharpening into distinct things, shapes undulating and reabsorbing one another. I had to focus to even see them. Were those eyes? My own vision swam. No, they were not, they were not eyes – in the same way whatever had moved the branches of that willow tree were not hands – still, it was looking at me, right at me, I could see no mouth and yet I knew it was open wide, could see no stomach – I mean, I couldn’t see these things, but I knew them, I was looking right at them – I could see them – I couldn’t – it’s hard –

As I was blinking frantically, trying to make sense of it, I felt my body begin to know something that my mind was still catching up to. In my body I felt that a connection was forming between me and this thing, that we were both noticing it at the same time. The Darkness was looking right back at me, observing me, and it had been since the moment we had first stepped out into the dark of the night and I had felt its eyes on me, they really had been on me, I had not imagined a thing. I thought I was seeing eyes appear within the Darkness, the iris and pupil of them, coming more and more into focus, looking right at me, and all of a sudden I felt what it was feeling – as purely as I could always feel what was happening within myself – and from the connection between us I felt curiosity, and then I felt amusement. 

I forced myself to look away, to look for something, anything to help us, and noticed the wooden spoon still sitting on the counter. I grabbed it and shoved it at Noah. 

“Here,” I said.

“What do I–?” 

This thing was Darkness, so I was thinking, well, how about light. 

“Set it on fire,” I said. 

Noah flicked the lighter once, twice, and this thing was still growing, inching towards us, slower than it had been before, and I thought Oh fuck, my lighter must be out of fluid, Oh fuck Oh fuck Oh fuck, and then the lighter finally caught fire, and it caught the bowl of the spoon, which then caught fire, which first traced gently along the edges of the wood and then roared up into flame. 

The Darkness stopped growing then. 

Noah raised the fire high. 

The silence roared, a violent thing in my ears, a living thing, worse than cicadas, worse than screaming, worse than sound. I covered my ears. Noah could not. He was holding the spoon. 

“Fuck you, dude,” he was yelling, and brandished the fire, stepping bravely forward.

I could almost see eyes widening, and not from within myself but from the Darkness, I felt surprise.

I wondered if I was imagining it pulling back as Noah stepped forward. The line it made was a real thing, the difference stark between the place where the Darkness was and where it was not. Noah was taking steps towards it, and it was inching back slowly, away from him, away from the fire. 

I was backing up, into the corner. I was so high. I was starting to feel like I might pass out. Was this happening? Even my worst highs had never been anything like this. 

There was a line between where the Darkness was and where the Darkness was not and Noah kept moving closer to that line faster than it was moving away. 

God, I thought. God. 

Noah started laughing. I didn’t know why. All my breath was gone. 

“Fuck you,” he said again. 

My stomach felt very low, and this was my own feeling, belonging only to me, and I knew that this was a bad, bad idea. Couldn’t Noah feel it? 

Noah shoved the fire into the Darkness, and it was like it reared back, caving in on itself, and at the same time I felt rage – no – disdain, and the silence became louder than ever, unlike any animal or living thing, unlike any other sound. 

“Seriously, dude,” Noah was yelling, and then he was crossing the line into where the Darkness was, one foot and then the other, his flame piercing the senseless thing, ripping into it, stinging it, and I could see a thousand not-eyes narrowing, and I could feel the thing’s indignation, and I could see and feel a thousand mouths opening, a thousand hands reaching for him, and I wanted to cry out Wait, but there was a vacuum where my mouth had been, and I could not scream. “Fuck–”

Noah was swept upwards, nearly off of his feet, and the flame went out, and there was the sound of a thousand jaws snapping shut, and I saw Noah’s head turn sharply left, mouth open in surprise, and then he was dropped on the kitchen floor like a very heavy puppet. 

The Darkness slithered away and everything else returned. 

Cicadas roared. Through the doorway, I could now barely see the living room, where the lamp beside the TV was flickering as it had before. That light trailed faintly into the kitchen, which was illuminated also by the bluish moon above, and I could see with no absence of clarity the shape of Noah’s body convulsing on the floor, the wrongness of that shape, the way that Noah’s neck had been broken so severely that his spine had made a mountain just beneath the surface of his skin.  

I dropped to my knees. I looked and then had to look away, I covered my eyes with my hands. Only with my eyes closed everything was dark again. I kept opening and closing my eyes but I saw it either way. I looked again because it could not be as bad as I remembered. I closed my eyes again, covered them, heels of hands. Worse. 

Then I was crying. I covered my eyes. I couldn’t look at him. I think he was still twitching. I knew that even if he was not dead yet, he was dead. 

I knew, as certainly as I had known we were being watched before, that we were not being watched now. 

I was no longer being watched. Me. Only me. 

Noah had just been here and we had been walking towards something like friendship – I thought – and there just wasn’t any reason, there wasn’t any reason – now he was – 

There was no Noah anymore and there wasn’t even that thing, that – whatever it was, it had been – it had looked like –

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. 

I did not feel high anymore. Well, actually, I did. It was making it worse. 

I thought I heard a cry, a strangled gasp, and felt the thump of fluttering limbs against the floor across from me, the fragile, helpless wings of them. 

“H—h…” 

I didn’t want to look. I pressed my palms hard against my eyes, shook my head vehemently, No, no, no. Nerves still firing. It didn’t mean he was still alive. Human bodies do this sometimes after they die. 

I thought, Had that thing intended to kill him? And then, Would it come back if it turned out it had not? And then I thought Why, and then, God, God, God.  

I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, pressed hard into the corner in the relative dark, Noah’s broken body twitching like a half-dead bug beside me, and waited for the fist to come down.