Long Stories, Short – 2: The Unlit Room

There was a stillness in the house that didn’t seem to nudge things to move from one room to another—air, objects, or people. You could see paintings on the wall, photographs on the mantel, humans in motions of existence. What was inconspicuously missing, however, was the flow of life, the rhythms of night and day.

Aria was in her room, at her desk, deep into her art. Hands, eyes, and raw attention were intentionally focused on her sketchbook, her lips pursed, brows drawn tight. Bea was in the adjacent room, lightly asleep, bathed in a flood of both amber and white lights.

It was past midnight.

~~

Past midnight routinely became dawn in this house at a pace slower than it did in the rest of the world. Since the night their world changed, Aria saw this unhurried becoming every night and waited for it to arrive. It gave her hope. She finally turned her desk light off and got up from the sketchbook to check on her mother.

She didn’t knock—just opened the slightly ajar door to Bea’s room. The amber and white lights were still blazing. She turned one of the lights off. Just one. Bea woke up as if she had never slept.

“It stays dark even with all lights switched on,” Bea whispered into the shadows between them.

“I know. I draw it like that too.”

“It can get so dark, and cold, and white, and quite endless; these nights.”

“Even after you have the lights on?”

“Hm. Haven’t you noticed? The lights in the house don’t make light anymore.”

For the first time in a long time, they talked. The black space seemed like something they were both in, not something standing between them.

Bea slept afterward. Aria left the room quietly, keeping just one light on. The room was still dark, but it was a shaded, shared darkness now.

~~

Time passed like water for them —a hesitant rivulet finding its way through rocks and stones.

One evening, the bulbs in Bea’s room finally fused. Both the bright white one and the warm amber. The room, which had been artificially day for weeks, flickered back into natural night.

Bea didn’t replace them right away. She sat in silence for a while. Aria came with a flashlight, like she used to when she was little and afraid of the dark. Now she was the one holding the light for her mother. They sat side by side on the bed in half-light.

Bea said, “I kept them on so I wouldn’t see him in the dark.”

Aria said, “I kept them off so I would in my head.”

For the first time in many nights, they spelt out the void, the person, the absence, and felt human feelings beyond freezing, numbing trauma — fatigue, perhaps grief.

~~

Aria had been sketching unconnected things in one frame: moon phases, ivy vines, doorways, skyscapes, silhouettes; inkwash elevators and spiral staircases, again and again, for weeks.

One night, Bea finally walked into Aria’s room. She stood at the desk, saw the sketchbook, flipped through the pages, and stopped at the last one. At the very top of the staircase, tiny, far away, facing away—a figure with a loose low bun. Her own hair.

“Is that… me?” Bea asked.

“You, or me. It’s us,” Aria replied. “Higher up, farther away. Where it is lighter. I can’t get there yet, so I keep drawing it.”

Bea touched the page, then Aria’s shoulder—their first touch in many weeks.

“Can you draw the stairs longer?” Bea asked. “So we allow us more time?”

“If I did, will you put out the white lights tonight, so we can let the real light get in?”

Don’t miss the first story in this series:

Long Stories, Short – 1: The Elevator | By Jumelia | LnC 

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About the Author

Jumelia (5 Posts)

Jumelia is an engineer, an IT consultant, a management student and a classical dancer; also an avid reader of various genres, a mother of two lovely daughters, and a diligent midnight blogger, all in random order. She is still soul-searching and poetry soothes her.
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