Happy 2024 spooky season! 👻
Just a quick note that this is a horror short.
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Drawn as if by a razor, a scar, segmented and pure, was slashed across the faultless blue of that summer’s morning, the darkness hanging weightlessly above the city below.
What could we do but watch? What could we do when a single constant is cut so neatly. Our unbroken sky, scored by a line of night, the morning undone and a void beyond lain bare.
The city stood still on that morning. Traffic halted in the street. Cars, their motors still running, lay abandoned on footpath and at intersection as if their owners had simply vanished. One by one we were stopped by the sight. People drawn to the silent crowd, looked up and were similarly frozen.
I remember the breathless quiet of that moment, the regular hum of the city hushed so completely by a terror that stabbed into the datum of us all. Where there was once noise, footsteps, conversation, laughter, only the wind remained. Just the hollow wind of a quiet city that echoed lost around lifeless buildings.
The day continued.
In time we returned to our day and resumed a life now more fragile than it once was.
Around the world people began reporting the same scar. As day broke further and further around the waking world, the line too drew itself across the sky, unfastening as the first rays of sun warmed and gave light to the ground.
How do you halt the earth’s turn?
People argued, as they always do. The news droned on and on about theories and hoaxes. They told us not to be scared with a tremor in their own voices.
There was anger. People shouted, demanding that something be done. Demanding that someone fix a thing that should have been so avoidable.
In time it became normal.
As the day closed and night obscured the blackness, we began to feel hope. In the morning things would return. The coming light would faultless and true. People even began to joke about the slash across the sky, or doubt that they had ever seen it at all. Night had healed the fissure, and we all began to believe that there had been some kind of victory, in a way. We celebrated, pointed upward to the stary night as if in defiance of the departing day. No line visible at night. The scar had been healed.
The departing dreams of morning returned, and the line was brought once more to the sky, darker, wider than it was before.
As the sun gently rose on that second morning the shape of a hand appeared just below the line, its gnarled fingers pressing down as if it were testing the strength of a canvas.
Slowly, four ash-burnt fingers bloomed from the fracture, spider-like and lithe.
Clasping without wind nor sound, the fingers clutched around that broken blue, pulling, tearing downward so that the scar became ragged, a once faultless totality now finite and torn. Wickedly, the frayed edges of that afternoon sky gave way unto a void beyond as more and was undone. The void folded, repeated upon itself thousands of times as if spiral of conjoined beginnings and ends. It was not singular but itself was torn into countless sunrises, countless sunsets, a nebula of darkness so hollow and all reaching. There were no stars, no visions of our own sun. This was space of utter nothing, where light echoed lost and alone. Pushing now, the hand cleaved the sheet of blue from the sky, a depthless act sundering heaven and allowing the world to finally react to the destruction so wracked upon the day.
A shockwave of light rippled outward from the tear. Wind, no longer silent as it had been before, became a gale of impossible strength, booming, fleeing away from the fracture, lifting great waves of water from the harbour, dashing them, discarding them against the city. Towers fell in great plumes of dust as noise was returned into a single concussive wail. Smoke and ash-clouds billowed upward, themselves becoming consumed by the wind, a haze of destruction unable to obscure the broken sky above.
And then it was seen.
A face of uncountable spirals did then appear from behind that fracture. Gazing, smiling upon the ruin it had created below.
Lost.
The sky had been taken from us and beyond only darkness remained.
~
2024
J. McCray
Sunday Short Stories 