Wilde Stories 2018 by Steve Berman

Author:Steve Berman [ed., Steve Berman,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

A photo flashed into the chat, breaking the lines of text. The chatter stopped, leaving only that picture standing silent and still and accusatory. Hard to see at first; at first it only looked black with a few traces of lighter shadow, like a piece of black construction paper crumpled into a ball, its corners catching the light. But slowly he picked out edges of terrain, the lines of roads, a few stubbornly clinging buildings, his eyes accustomed to finding details in the dark even when the dark was the blur of a night-locked snapshot taken at a distance. And he realized: the few buildings scattered around the outer edges of the photo cut off as if they’d been shorn, their insides exposed like dollhouses. The roads converged toward the center of the image and then disappeared into a blackness so thick it reflected nothing, as thick as the shadows he imagined on lonely nights. A blackness with substance.

A sea. A sea of the dark, so deep it couldn’t even be called a hole, swallowing everything into it.

The only way to find its edges was to find the light: a subtle crackling blue-white glow following the contours of the land, jagged at the edges as lightning, ringing the perimeter of that dark space. The edges of the crack. The edges of a hole in the universe, ripped open and swallowing an entire city into the void.

Asad’s throat clenched, knotting painfully.

Was this what happened when people got sloppy with wanting, and left the cracks open too long?

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