Lightless

It was hot.

And humid.

The room tasted like summer, all wet dirt and corn sweat. Focusing on anything, let alone something as consuming as writing a novel, was bordering on insane. Or impossible. The effort of thought was strenuous enough to break a sweat. And I was already sweating.

Heat wasn't something I ever shied away from. See the example of running when the asphalt can burn my feet through the soles of my shoes. But when the hands of the clock have met at twelve and dragged on to the next round of numbers, it was easily time for a break.

The sole silver lining was the rose.

Sitting on my desk, meant to inspire my writing as a gift from my husband, its smell clung to the currents of air drifting through the room. It was enough to cleave the last of my concentration in half, effectively killing it.

Leaning back in an old chair that always threatened to tip, I laced my hands behind my head and looked down at the flower now caught under the yellow glow of a book light subbing as a desk lamp.

What a beautiful sight it was.

Like other aspects of my photography and my long-form writing, I could see both light and dark clashing as they always did, but the longer I looked, the stranger something about it seemed.

It carried the message in my book.

The brighter the star burned, the blacker the surrounding universe seemed. That wasn't to say the universe was empty and lightless. It was simply black by comparison.

And next to a star, what wouldn't be?

Sitting upright, I dropped my arms and hunched over the flower as though it kept some secret from me. Maybe I was mad from the heat seeping into my head. Or maybe I had just been up too long after a string of sleepless nights suffocated by the heat. Maybe I was just mad. Period, point, end of discussion. Mad like that character I was writing.

I stared at that rose until the moon had enough of my silliness and went to bed. It left me alone with the much older stars who were by nature a touch more patient. They peered through the windows, simply watching as I stared at the warm light dripping across the rose.

The more I looked, the more it seemed as though the light was not spilling onto the flower but that the shadows were the thing doing the spilling. They crept out of the world around me. Oozed out of the cracks in the walls. They ran fingertips across the darkening patches of the aging rose and whispered a thrill of death across the rippled edges of the petals. I wondered if the rose could hear the call of the void or if that was just me because I'd spent too much time playing around with it.

The shadows were intense things, moving quickly now as a middle-of-the-night thunderstorm blew its tempest winds through the open windows. It wasn't often that the shadows had a mind of their own, but they did tonight, almost as though excited by the dark promise of death clinging to the roses.

The scent around me shifted, more ozone than rose and more violence than peace. The flower yearned for something. It had a hunger. One that slowly grew inside of my chest. It was deep, clawing like a starving beast until I too had some mysterious hunger that could not sate. I wanted but who knows for what.

It hit me with the first grumble of thunder trembling through the house.

L'appel du vide.

Creaking in protest as I moved, the chair pitched to one side, but it didn't matter. I was already up and dashing to grab the camera because this was what I was looking for.

The call of the void, l'appel du vide, in something mundane.

This was the spine of the story.

And after months of no progress, I'd found the radioactive core of the beast.