Elias's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Elias sat on the edge of his bed and waited for his own name to mean something again. It had been weeks since it last did. The word came at him like a knock on a door he no longer answered. He worked twelve-hour shifts and came home to a quiet apartment, and somewhere in those hours he had started wishing, in a small way he barely admitted, that he could simply stop. He did not want to die. He wanted to be unmade. He was trying not to want that. He was not sure he was winning. The digital clock on his nightstand clicked from 3:16 to 3:17. Outside, the streetlight stuttered three times and held. Elias watched the floorboards near his Pikachu slippers begin to bow inward, drawn toward a single point as if the wood were water. The point darkened. Cracks ran out from it in a clean ring. A hole opened where the floor had been, lipped with broken planks, deep in a way that had nothing to do with the apartment below. A hand came over the rim. Then another. The shape that climbed out was his shape, his height, his slouch, but black all the way through, edges fraying into the dark of the room. The Pikachu slippers were on its feet now, too. Elias reached for the lamp. The bulb popped. Glass rained on the bedding. "You kept calling," the shadow said. Its voice was flat and close, like a thought he had not spoken. "Every time you turned off the lights. Every time you wished the world would go quiet." Elias opened his mouth to argue. Nothing came. He had wished it. He had wished it last night, and the night before, in the small bright square of his bathroom mirror, looking at a face that felt borrowed. "Let go," the shadow said. "You are tired. I will carry the rest." Elias meant to say no. Instead, his shoulders dropped. The shadow took his hand. The grip was cool and exactly the size of his own. Elias felt the want rise in him before he could stop it, that small awful relief of being lifted out of his life. The room tilted. The hole in the floor rose to meet his face. He fell without falling. He landed on his feet in a place with no light. No walls, no ceiling, no ground he could see. Behind him, a single arch stood upright in the dark, framed in crackling blue static, the only thing he could make out in any direction. It hummed like a bad television. Through it, he could just see his bed, the green blanket, the empty slippers. The shadow was not beside him anymore. Elias understood, with a clarity he had not felt in months, that he had agreed to this, and that he wanted to take it back.