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They’d sip their shadows and the darkness stained them. Anyone who said they saw it coming told bad lies. There existed no concrete prophecy foretelling the malady, no rational explanation science could come to. How could it be, this new behavior? Drinking light’s absence? Falling crude victim?
The religious offered up bits of texts.
From Acts and Joel and Revelations came the closest warning: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.”
“But the moon ain’t blood,” skeptics argued.
“Not yet,” believers said, looking up at the night sky gravely.
And then from the Al-Furqan:“But they are going to know, when they see the punishment who is farthest astray . . . Have you seen the one who takes as his god his own desire . . . Have you not considered your Lord—how He extends the shadow, and if He willed, He could have made it stationary? Then We made the sun for it an indication. Then We hold it in hand for a brief grasp.”
“So it’s a punishment from God?”
“Only He knows why He does His doings.”
When doctors were asked to explain it, they’d invoke other anomalies from medical history—mysteries, freak occurrences that could never be explained:
“Strasbourg, Alsace in 1518. A woman named Frau Troffea begins dancing, can’t stop. Dozens join in with her, within a month, hundreds. All of them dancing ferociously, endlessly. No one knows why, though some have blamed a kind of mass psychosis induced by stress, others suggesting ergot poisoning might have fueled the catastrophe. See, many of the dancers danced themselves to death, and it’s even been said that the dancers danced beyond that. Moved on with some inaudible, internal music even postmortem. And no one is entirely certain why.”
“This ain’t 1518, though.”
“And ain’t nobody fucking dancing.”
Murk
The sun was up, so the dark could start. All about the ground, all in the same direction, shadows sprawled. And this is what he was after.
Murk crept from the mesquite trees into the full light of day. Hobbling, his clothes dirty and tattered—his left leg a wooden peg. He shooed gnats from his face as he advanced, humming a bit of tune.
“A world with two suns,” he sang softly, “and both are for me.” It was as if his mother’s breast milk had been ashes. He had thirsty-looking skin and hair thickly greased with sleep. He’d been growing it out, his hair, and wasn’t used to the length of it. He constantly tucked the brown thatch behind his ears. Most his life, he’d kept it short, but he’d found an old Doors album while rummaging a capsized van, and he wanted to look like the guy on the cover. Around that time, he’d started making up songs.
He found the sun and put his back to it. He knew he should wait a few hours, let the light get brighter, his shadow darker, more potent, but the call in him could not be placated—he lacked self-control.
“I missed you,” he said to his shadow on the ground. He waved. It waved back. He danced. It did too. “Lose weight?” he asked it. “Something different with your hair?” But, of course, there was no answer. “Either way,” he said, “looking good.”
He dropped to his knees, lowered his face to his shade-made print, now a hunched clot of dark on the grass.
“A world with two suns,” he continued singing, “that is the dream.”
He was silent. Lust slithered across his face. He tucked his mane behind his ears, palmed his cheeks, and motes of dry skin swirled away.
Then . . .
Down he went like a starving man. His mouth bored open, he crashed against dirt, and he gulped at the dark, each swallow dimming the shade. Murk grunted and gnashed, pulling the shadow off the ground and into his mouth, down in his belly.
When he’d gotten it all, or as much as he could gather, he rolled to his back laughing and let the magic work its charm. “A world with two suns,” he bellowed, “that is the dream,” his mouth as wide open as an opera singer’s and his lips and teeth grayed with stain. His eyes drew black. His skin went pale. His veins showed through like sooty scribbles on pale parchment.
In the distance he could hear the train. To Murk, it was the sound of heaven.
The Train
Mira crouched, watching for the train to race around again on its mile-long, circular track. She looked for the break between the caboose and the engine to catch glimpse of the buildings beyond. A step in front of her, the grass had been scorched away, covered with white rocks, but the smell of the scorching lingered, and Mira sniffed the perfume of it, her brown eyes sleepy in the smell. She messed her hair. She’d never thought much of it, but then Murk started growing his and one day she looked at him and couldn’t help but ask, “Are you trying to look like me?”
He got defensive, something about some singer.
“You’re trying to steal my fucking haircut,” she told him.
And Murk called Mira all kinds of dirty names and stomped off on his peg leg to wherever Murk went when Mira sent him stomping.
But now, she thought, “Shit, he can have it.”
Just beyond the train, observation towers stood, and in them guards trained guns on the perimeter of rocks. Mira heard the man’s voice through his bullhorn.
“Closer and I’ll fire.”
It was half past noon, and Mira was ambivalent. She’d been coming to the train for days now with the halfhearted idea of dying, but each time she’d come, nothing happened. This threat was the first she’d heard, and it made the consequence of her dying more real to her.
That’s the thing about suicidal thinking: it’s kind of harmless until it isn’t.
A few days back, she’d stood motionless with a bouquet of citrus blossoms clutched to her chest, a kind of funeral service in her heart, but she’d only lingered for hours thinking she’d gone unnoticed. She’d even shown her shadow then, turning it off and on, hoping the strobe of it might gain some attention, but it didn’t.
The next time, she’d gone to a different edge of the town, thinking maybe her luck would change if she tried another observation tower. Each time the train sped up, but no shots were fired. She thought mildly of running for the train, throwing herself beneath its heavy steel wheels and letting the train cars chew her up to yuck, but she couldn’t seem to get her legs to go through with it.
It was puzzling. She’d been shot at before. When Murk had sent her to the train the first time. It’s why she’d even come to think of this as a way out of the world. So what was different? Why weren’t they firing now?
She knelt toward the rocks, lifted one of the white pebbles casually. Her tanned knees flecked with scars, her palms rough from hard work and living. She dropped the rock, contemplated the white dust it left behind on her. She blew at it and most of the stuff disappeared, and what was left she licked away, spat out at the grass, and the chalky flavor of the task left a scowl on her face.
“What now, Mira?” she asked herself, her words aimed at the train. “What happens next?”
