As the Light Turns

On the ancient, boxy TV screen, my brother-in-law awoke on the edge of a four-way intersection. The concrete beneath him was soaked in blood. He felt around his body for injuries, but there were none. A short, red trail behind him pointed towards two cars that were crushed up like wads of paper. One was his silver SUV, now with its nose accordioned flat and its windshield blown out. The traffic light above his head cast a crimson glimmer over the shiny wreckage. The light didn’t appear like it would turn for some time.

My sister sitting next to me took a deep breath, and leaned into the microphone.

“Hun, can you hear me? It’s Martha. I’m here.”

John started at the sound of her voice, and spun his head around on a swivel in search of her.

“Martha, baby? Where are you? Where…”

“I’m here, John. I have a visual of you. We’re going to get you out of there, okay?”

“Okay…?” He agreed, confused but fully trusting his wife.

“Can you stand?” She asked, and he hoisted himself to the ground with ease.

“Great,” she continued. “Now, tell me what you see.”

As John explained his surroundings, the perspective of the screen widened to accommodate everything he was describing. Around him was a sprawling cityscape with all its lights off save for those in the street, directing traffic that wasn’t there. John appeared to be the only soul in sight, until he looked up.

Perched atop the highest skyrise there was a hulking, dark silhouette. One of its arms was short and fidgeted restlessly at its side. The other was a long tendril wrapped around the tower’s tip, holding the creature up there.

“What the hell is that?!” John shouted, catching its attention.

“It’s nothing, John,” Martha explained. “Be aware of it, but don’t be afraid. Listen, I’m going to need you to scout around for things we can use, okay? Provisions, tools, and, ideally, a vehicle. Think you can do that?”

John nodded and went on his way, trying to shut the creature out of his mind. He swept through the city for some time, collecting miscellaneous goods that might be of some use. There were no cashiers around to charge him for what he was taking, nor authorities to punish him for his thievery.

“What’s going on?” He asked Martha. “What happened here?”

My eyes caught hers, and she shook her head no before answering him.

“I don’t know. We just woke up and everything was like this. But if we can find each other, we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

He halted on the sidewalk and turned to the building beside him, changing the subject completely.

“Martha, I think I’m at our apartment.”

She squirmed in her seat and held the mic closer.

“I already cleared out everything we need. You should keep moving.”

But as she was saying it, he was already making his way inside and up the stairs to their room.

“I just want one last look.”

Down a long hallway, he found their room and entered without trouble.

“Forgot to lock the door, I see,” he joked.

Martha chuckled nervously.

John wandered the living room, eyeing the tchotchkes that were left behind. He stopped at the painting on the wall of himself and Martha overlooking a lush sunset.

“Remember that day?” He asked.

Martha didn’t answer him.

“Surprised you didn’t take this with you,” he added.

“Figured it was best to travel light.”

John seemed upset by this, but didn’t vocalize it. He found himself in their bedroom, where he collapsed onto the bed with a relieved heave.

“Come on, John. You can’t rest now. There’s no time.”

“But I’m tired, honey.”

“I know, but right now you have to keep moving.”

John had already drifted to sleep by the time she finished speaking.

After a few minutes of her trying to wake him up, the speakers on the TV unleashed a garbled ringing sound—one akin to an alarm clock, but resonant enough to sound like a tornado siren. John’s eyes wandered open, and he caught a glimpse of the creature out the window atop a faraway building.

“John, John! Wake up! It’s time to go!”

He turned himself over in the bed, trying to ignore it all. But when he opened his eyes again, the creature was gone. Its absence was enough to unsettle him. He crawled out of bed just in time, before an enormous dark arm burst through the open window and started swatting all around. John ran from the room as the walls came falling down behind him and the floor tremored.

As he sprinted back down the long hallway, the monster’s long, tentacle-like arm slithered down the corridor like a hungry serpent. Once it had traveled as far as it could, it started to slam itself into the walls around it, cleaving the building in two.

John rushed down the staircase and back outside. Above him, the building’s top half was crumbling down to the ground in an avalanche of debris. Over the wreckage stood the creature, from which the horrible ringing sound was still emerging. John couldn’t hear a word Martha shouted to him. He just ran.

Around the corner, a silver SUV much like his own was parked on the curb. Its doors were unlocked, and its key was left in the ignition, so he got in and took off without even buckling his seatbelt. The mirrors were already adjusted to his likeness, and in them, he could see the monster stampeding down the street after him.

“It can’t hurt you!” Martha shouted in vain. She frantically flipped through the notebook in her hands, searching for some all-knowing page that didn’t exist.

Down the road, there was a traffic light that glowed an inviting green.

He drew closer. It turned yellow.

He drew even closer. It turned red.

Suddenly, he was under the light. So was another car—one that he didn’t see coming in all the commotion. The cars collided. John was ejected from his vehicle upon impact, and left a trail of blood on the ground behind him. The light held its hue. The creature halted in its tracks, scanned the wreckage, and leapt into the air, presumably returning to its perch. The screen lingered on the intersection for some time.

I stared in disbelief, not understanding what I had just witnessed.

“Martha, how many times have you done this?” I asked.

She ignored me, picked her notebook up off the ground, and started writing on a blank page. I snatched it from her hands and read the header:

Attempt 2985.

I snapped the book shut and stared at her in total shock.

“Oh my god,” was all I could say.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she responded.

I looked over her shoulder at John, who laid comatose in the hospital bed. His skin was coarse as sandpaper, having healed unevenly, yet remarkably. The green line of light on the heart rate monitor beside his bed climbed and dipped steadily, and beeped with each pass, as was its duty.

“Has John been living through some twisted, demented version of his accident on loop for the past year?!”

She did not answer.

“And you’ve been… What have you been doing, exactly?! Walking him through it as if it were all real? Why don’t you tell him what’s going on? That it’s all a sick dream!?”

“The doctors say the cerebral link will fry his brain if external stimuli is too provocative for the current levels of brain activity.”

I shrugged. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means he can’t know.”

“What’s the endgame here, Martha?” I asked, chucking her notebook back into her hands.

She shifted in her seat and answered meekly.

“I think if I can get him through that damn intersection just once.... maybe… maybe he’ll wake up.”

“And why on Earth would you think that?”

“A hunch.”

I laughed angrily, baffled by the notion.

“You’re letting him live through the worst moment of his life on repeat because of a hunch! A hunch that, even if it’s right, there’s no telling you’ll actually be able to get him through the intersection. And what the hell is that thing chasing him?”

She dipped her head down.

“He was running late on the day of the accident. Slept through his alarm, didn’t watch the clock closely enough, all that. I think that thing is his mind’s way of representing… Time?”

I stood up and started pacing.

“Do you hear how fucked up that is?”

She said nothing.

“Martha, you can’t change what happened no matter how hard you try. You can’t keep doing this. You have to—”

“No.”

I looked down at her in the chair. She flipped back to her blank page, and resumed writing. Eventually, John woke back up on the screen, and the cycle started again. Martha spoke to him from a vantage point he could never know of.

They went through the motions repeatedly. She was trying to convince me that it could be done differently, but the key details were always the same. He entered the apartment, got in the bed, rested, woke up to find himself being hunted by Time Itself, got in his car, crashed under the intersection, and did it all again. By the fifth time he was driving, I had enough.

I didn’t know what the machines he was hooked up to specifically did, but I had a pretty good idea what would happen if they were turned off. I started pulling plugs. Lights blinked off with each severed connection. Martha quickly realized what I was doing and tried to stop me, but once the machines were unplugged, all I had to do was keep her away from them. Time would handle the rest.

I held her back. She kicked, and screamed, and cried, and the more she did, the more I wanted to plug everything back in myself. But I couldn’t. That wouldn’t be fair to John.

The doctors stormed in once they heard the commotion. They tried to sort through the wires I had tossed around and put everything back into place, but by that point, it was too late. The heart rate monitor’s beeping turned to a drawn out hum, and the green line flattened. Martha froze in my arms. I glanced over my shoulder to see the TV screen. John was still driving. He was about to pass through the intersection. The light was still green. He made it.

I let Martha go. She hurried over to his bedside, grabbed his face, and tried to lull him awake. He did not move or react whatsoever. There was not so much as a breath.

A garbled voice broke through the white noise blaring from the TV speakers.

“M—a—rtha? Are you—still here?”

A doctor gave Martha the microphone. She swiped her hand across her nose with a loud snort and cleared her throat to speak.

“I’m here, baby. I’m here.”

Everybody in the room watched the screen intently. The image was hazy and reducing in quality fast, but it was still discernible for a time. John was on a beach, and the Sun was setting, but instead of the Sun’s usual fiery white, it burned a cool, calm green. At John’s side stood Time Itself as his mind understood it—a once ravenous monster now hushed and soothed by the end of something. The beast wandered into the ocean, turning the water and sky black as it fully submerged itself.

John tried to speak again, but the words were nearly incomprehensible.

“Can— I—?”

Martha steadied her breathing and answered for him.

“Yes. You can rest. You have time.”

John didn’t respond. Alongside everyone else in the room, he watched the emerald sliver of Sun shrink away into the void. Slowly, and quietly, the last shred of light turned to darkness and static.