A Manual for How to Love Us by Erin Slaughter

Author:Erin Slaughter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

II

A Manual for How to Love Us

ELECTRICITY

Before there was light, there was a surge that swallowed all of what was formerly known to be light. The People stumbled around their Houses, tapping on the glass, not sure how to lure the glow back into the cages they made to hold it. It was a bounty that had always just been there, like sudden bursts of laughter behind locked doors, or water pouring from a faucet. The colored panes of windows, void of the sun’s warmth, atrophied and shattered in their frames. Able to see the guts of light bulbs for the first time, fashioned from friction and simple wire, The People grew panicked. They had lived so long in illumination they’d never considered the properties of darkness.

At first, they felt the absence physically, like every yellow pigment had been licked away, leaving shapeless cavities, unexplored territories of flesh and vein and wishing. In those days, The People lived as one synchronized Body, and when a Person was racked with emptiness, The People communally felt that emptiness as their own.

In an attempt to trap the fled light, The People split from each other into new, separate cages of meat and bone, and they no longer recognized one another as they had in the old world. They learned for the first time to migrate by blind noise, to recognize the edges of their own shadows. They touched without speaking, came to relearn friends by the unique funneling of breath through nostrils, and lovers by the particular lack they nursed. They mimed fingers the shape of candles, made lanterns of their hollows. They sometimes took comfort in the blanket of night and allowed themselves to be lonely, knowing that in the dark there is always someone you can’t see watching. They sometimes did not try their best to be kind to one another.

Sometimes they tried very hard, and when it seemed they had succeeded, The People might, for a moment, hallucinate a spark—might imagine the lamplit flicker of a face come into view. They realized if they visualized the light clearly enough, it could be so again: the wires of their bulbs electrified, the neon of a supermarket’s smile, the orange glow of a childhood kitchen in the humid middle of night. This is how they were by the time you were born, The People, stumbling through a blackness they believed could turn inverse by the power of crude hope. The lightness of memory more brilliant than it had been in reality:

This is the world you were born into.

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