Separate Skins

Sometimes the darkness and I….

Sometimes the darkness and I….

Sometimes the darkness isn’t here.

Sometimes the darkness isn’t here.

I sit on the ground, near where it becomes the sky. The sky isn’t real, though. If it was I would fall into it, probably. But it’s not. So I lean against it, and I don’t fall.

My hands hurt.

I start to say something about the tiny flat forest that is floating in the middle of the not-real sky, but then I remember that the darkness isn’t here.

I think maybe the sun behind the fake forest is real, though. I feel very warm.

I wonder where the darkness went. I remember its eyes going dim and then flaring red when I asked who did this, who made the tiny flat forest and the fake sky and the painted on clouds.

Maybe it went to find out.

Or maybe the darkness did it. Maybe this is the universe it created for me, since I am too weak to see its Reality, and I hurt its feelings when I shouted and tried to beat up its clouds.

They are very pretty fake clouds. And the tiny forest is really well done. I think compliments out into space, hoping the darkness is listening and that it will hear that I like its sky and clouds and trees, that I’m not mad, and that it’ll come back.

I really hope it comes back.

Please, please come back.

Sometimes the darkness isn’t here.

I left the edge of the universe. It was making me dizzy. The darkness should still be able to find me when it comes back. It can hear my thoughts.

I found a place for a fire, with the wood all set up and ready. But I don’t have anything to start a fire with. If the darkness was here, it would glower at the wood with its red eyes and start a fire. But my eyes are human, so all they can do is look at things.

I look at things.

The painted sky isn’t very far away. This universe seems terribly small.

I sit on the tree trunk bench, and I look at the rocks gathered in a circle and at the wood waiting for the darkness to set it on fire, and I try very hard to not think about the painted sky closing in on me.

I hear the darkness whispering in my mind, but it’s faint and I can’t make out the words. And then it’s gone.

The sun that I think may be real is going down, and it’s getting cooler.

I wish my eyes could set things on fire.

Sometimes the darkness isn’t here.

Maybe. I don’t know. I hear its voice sometimes, in my head. No words, but it hisses at me for a few seconds. Then it’s gone.

I found a ladder. I found a house. I put them together. I like it up here, on top of the house. There is a chimney, with bricks that are very warm and beautiful in the light from the setting sun.

I wonder if anyone has ever lived in this house.

Probably a nice family lived here once, with a loving mother and a devoted father and happy little children.

I touch the chimney, and I imagine them all gathered around the fireplace below on a cold winter’s evening. They would have been out sledding and building snowmen. Maybe the waterfall and its pond had frozen. I don’t know if waterfalls can freeze. I think they can, if it’s cold enough. So maybe the family had been ice skating too, around the waterfall.

I imagine the family sitting there in front of the fire, being very happy, probably singing songs and roasting walnuts. They loved each other, really a lot.

But then the darkness came, and it told them that this universe belonged to it now, and they had to leave. It said “What you think of as home does not exist in this particular skin of the universe.” It grinned its funny little grin at them, and its red eyes blazed, and they got up and they left.

I can see them, if I think really hard. Going down the trail of silence to the edge, and stepping over it. Crying, because where are they going to go now, like they don’t even have a universe to call their own. And they look back, at their home with its brick chimney and its view of the waterfall and the ladder they’d left outside because they were planning on stringing lights around the roof. But it’s not theirs anymore, and they have to go.

I can see the darkness, waving goodbye as it paints the clouds and the flat forest, as it shuts them out of this universe and into a strange alien one where they don’t know anyone and no one cares about them and there might be giant blue pigs that will oink at them and frighten the small ones.

I hope they at least went to the universe where the winged kittens live.

I hear the darkness hissing in my mind again, and this time I can make out a word. Just one, but it’s there. The hissing disappears but the word is still there, and I turn it around and around in my mind and I look at it, and I try to figure out what it means.

“Home.”

Sometimes the darkness is here, in my mind. It’s not actually physically here, like I don’t see any red eyes or shimmery gray legs anywhere, but I hear it in my mind, whispering and hissing.

I don’t think it knows that I can hear it.

The words go in and out. “Home” shows up again. There’s a strong sharp “No!” I hear “Reality,” then “apple,” then “sick”.

It’s talking about me.

I wonder who it’s talking to. I don’t hear anyone else. Maybe it’s talking to itself. Maybe it’s floating along some other trail in some other universe, ranting about how I’m weak and silly and a burden, and how I can’t see Reality without bleeding to death.

I hope it comes back once it’s done having its little fit.

I get down off the roof. It’s getting cold. And the waterfall keeps booming and booming in my ears. Why are there so many waterfalls? Every universe we go to has waterfalls. I’d trade this waterfall for the winged kittens. They were only in the one universe, because they are special. Waterfalls are not.

I’m in every universe too, just like the waterfalls, so I think maybe I’m not special either.

The hissing comes back, in my mind, and this time the word I hear is “Please?”

I’ve never heard the darkness say that before. Maybe it was whoever the darkness is talking to. That makes sense. It’s probably a bird or an alligator or a fence or an abandoned building or something asking the darkness to please leave it alone and to not take its skin, that it is not really interested in being a container for the void right now, sorry.

I hear it again.

“Please?”

No, that is the darkness. I know that hiss.

I try to imagine what sort of entity the darkness would have to entreat for a favor.

I am very afraid.

Sometimes I am the shadows, and I flow over all things.

Sometimes I am an alligator, and I hiss and snap and bite.

Sometimes I am dark gray bones, and my heels clack upon the earth.

Sometimes I am a shimmering gray fog, and I am here and not here at the same time.

I am not always alone. But always, always, I am dark.

I fashion a street and lights and trees and clouds and a sky from the emptiness, but it’s not the same without someone to look upon it and declare it Real.

I howl, but no one answers. The human is far away, in another universe. One with slightly different clouds, and a waterfall. The human likes waterfalls. The human thinks that waterfalls are Real.

Or it did. Before.

I am not always alone.

But I am alone right now.

Sometimes I am here.

The light from the streetlight hurts.

I made it. I made the streetlight and the street and the trees and the houses in the distance. I could turn the light off. But I don’t.

I find the human. It is still at the edge of the other universe. It thinks it hurt my feelings. It wants me to come back. But I can’t.

I close the link to its thoughts. Goodbye, human.

I make a breeze. I send it off through the trees. Now there is noise. Not much, but enough. I make insects too. They buzz as they fly around the light.

This skin, this foggy grayness with all its limbs, is not suitable. It fades in and out, and when it fades out I see what is really there.

I am weak. I gave too much to the human. Far too much.

But I wanted it with me.

I remember its anger, its fists hitting me. The only fists it will ever have. At least I get to change skins sometimes.

The skin fades back in, and now I see what is not there. I stare at the streetlight. It hurts. The lightbulb and the insects buzzing around it and the shadows and pools of light on the sidewalk hurt so much.

I keep staring at the light because it doesn’t hurt as much as the other thing, the thing I will see when this skin fades out again.

I think of what the human screamed, when it hit me with its soft fragile fists.

“Home.”

The insects buzz and the light bulb crackles and the breeze stirs the leaves of the trees, and the light shines and shines.

Sometimes I am here.

It’s so quiet. I never realized how much noise the human made, with all its thinking and talking and barking at pigs, and its yelling about a “home”.

Do I have a home?

The skin fades out, and I see it. The endless howling black.

Perhaps this is my home.

I think the human’s home was something that it valued and that it missed terribly, not something that hurt. But also I think its home was where it came from. This is where I came from.

It is what I am, without my skins.

The skin forms itself again. It took longer this time.

I really should not have given so much to the human.

I make a pond to pass the time. I wish the human were here. It would try to catch a fish from the pond. I wonder if it could make a fishing hook from this skin.

I don’t know what kind of fish it would catch, using a hook that fades out into Reality and back. The fish it caught with the bones, in the desert universe, tasted like rainbows but not as good. I think a fish caught in this universe with this gray fog skin would taste like death, and also possibly despair.

The darkness tastes best when it hides in the light.

There is no light here to hide in. There is only the light I made. It is weak and thin and it buzzes, and it shines only on emptiness.

The skin fades, faster than it did before.

Once you have tasted form and function, the loss of it feels like…what did the human call it? An icepick to the brain, I think. Or an ulcer eating into a vein.

I howl and howl, and there is no answer.

I took the human from its universe. I wanted to show it mine.

I did not know that my universe would kill it.

The skin does not come back. The howl goes on and on and on. The skin does not come back, and the howl becomes a scream. The scream goes on and on and on, and the black never ends.

Sometimes the human and I….

Sometimes the human and I….

Sometimes I am not here.