| Monika Goetz
by Wade Nacinovich
The Light
After a few days they pulled a twin bed on a metal frame
into the penumbra of the bright light and sat down on the thin mattress. As they watched
the light for the first few weeks, the events that had made up their lives seemed more
difficult to grasp. They didn’t remember exactly what it was like before it had come
and each minute that had passed since then pushed their former lives further away until
they found themselves asking, "Where was it that we had the picnic under the crab
apple tree when the red ants stung our calves or Who was it who died when the car crashed
into the candy store or When was the last war?"
They didn’t know what other risks it posed, so they
sat to the side and studied it. It was not composed of rays, like the shafts of light
broken by the edges of high clouds in midday, nor did it glow in soft shades of color as
sunlight does when it ascends and descends each day, or hang benignly like afternoon light
in curtains. It wasn’t like the moonlight that used to float into their quiet rooms
or hang in a dull glow in the fog that settled in the fields and copses. It was more like
putting their wide-open eyeball next to an electric light bulb, which they had never done,
but could quite well imagine.
It had arrived unannounced at night. One moment they were
in the dark of their room listening to crickets and the next, the light had found some
little crack in the doorway and had pried the door open. It took a while to adjust to such
a thing, but soon their pupils dilated into little pins and they could consider its
presence without shielding their eyes with their hands. They looked out the windows to see
the source of all the brightness but found only darkness, so it was as if the light began
at the threshold of their doorway. Their curiosity grew and they dared to go closer.
She tried to close the door, first pushing it with her
finger, then more forcefully with her hand. After these efforts achieved nothing, she
leaned against it with her shoulder and the light only increased in intensity. She
returned to the shadows and could not adequately describe the experience.
"Did it move?" he asked her.
"Yes, but only a little," she said.
So he tried. He thought his extra heft might produce more
clear results, but the light again burned more brightly when the door moved into it. The
energy of the light had not pushed the door further ajar, satisfied with the gap it
already occupied, asking for no more nor giving up less space, so they decided not to
press their luck and left it as it was. They examined it more and as time passed, how
much, they didn’t know, they became somewhat inured to its force; in fact, they began
to enjoy its cold, uniform radiance. It was the same kind of spell that fell over them
when they burned scraps of wood, stalks of corn and crisp dead leaves in a big barrel out
in a field, stilly watching the flames until they fell into the dark bottom of the barrel.
Then they had to walk back to the heavy air and flat shadows of their home.
Now they no longer felt compelled to look out the window or
meander to any other room in the house. They supposed that the sun and moon still passed
over their home. They moved the bed closer to the clear, pristine edge of the body of
light in the perfect quiet of the room.
One day she turned to him and asked, "Who are
you?"
"Who are you?" he replied, undisturbed by the
presence of a stranger in his house.
They looked at each other for some time, examining their
faces lit up so brilliantly that there were no shadows to distinguish anything familiar on
the surface. They turned their gaze back to the light, grabbed one end of the bed in
unison, pulling it into the center of the light’s path, and sitting down on the
bed’s edge, faced the light, the shadows of their bodies stretching behind them.
Later they turned to each other again.
"How did we get here?"
Wade Nacinovich is a fiction writer living in Brooklyn. He
received is MFA from Brooklyn College in 2001and has been published in The Brooklyn Review
and will be published in the upcoming Pindeldyboz #4. He also collaborated with the artist
Erika deVries, writing a story for her recent exhibition, "A Little Bird Told
Me," at M.Y. Art Prospects. |
