It’s past midnight. The wind has died. The sun shines mercilessly, its silent light bleeding into the cottage through cracks in the blinds, scratching lines upon the crib, beside which the woman sits; in which “baby is crying,” the woman says; rocking the crib, “he’s hungry,” she says but the cabinets are empty and the sun shines. We are all hungry. The baby wails.
Sometimes night comes.
Sometimes not.
I know what must be done. I take my axe from the wall. I take my leather bag and venture outside.
The heat. The blinding whiteness. It didn’t used to be this way. My eyes adjust. I stalk. Once we believed night to be absence of sunlight. Time; Cycle. Perhaps we were right. Perhaps: I scan the surroundings for any hint of darkness. Roving darkness. I discern stillness only. Once we believed night to be absence of sunlight; we were wrong. Night is a creature. A living flowing darkness bounded and obscurant like smoked glass through which the world appears dimmed, other and stygian…
When night became, our patterns broke. Crops failed. Minds collapsed under strain of untethered brightness. I knew once a day lasting a hundred. No respite. I was in Prague when night climbed over the horizon and swallowed the city; down its inky throat we plunged to the belly gloom, from which only some crawled out. Such was when night was one.
I see a slinking shadow.
Grip my axe.
We first severed near Shanghai. Millions of Chinese working in tandem. Hacking. Until the whole of night was broken and the severed was alone and surrounded, beaten to death over weeks, months, until it no longer moved. In tandem, beaten. Beaten.
Night exists now in infinite smaller pieces. Not conquering. Fleeing.
I run toward it.
It slithers away like a ribbon tween trees over blades of static grass; like a ribbon in a wind that does not blow, I follow. In brutal hiss of daylight. In undying radiance.
There are those obsessed with gazing at the world through night: ‘s bleak lens. They follow it. Cultists. Herding it. Nurturing it to try to unify and restore. They have become night’s defenders.
This night however is without. Unguarded.
I rush into—
Swinging my axe. Blade penetrating the unknowable dark succulence. Relentless. It turns away. Lashes back. Evading I deal the final blow, and as a chunk of night lies steaming dusk into the ether the wounded remains flitter away to solitude,
to safety.
I pack the chunk into my leather bag.
Clean my axe.
Inside the cottage, the woman kindles a fire. We grill night-flesh. Scent transfixing him, baby opens his black eyes. The woman feeds him till he is satisfied. He sleeps. We too eat. I think, What will become of us who consume only night. What will become of us when the infinities of night are gone and we are left, just we and the blinding sun, shining through the cracks, scratching lines into us all.