Weekly Writing – February 3 2024

He tried to look at the screen only from the leery corner of his eye, as if it would help. Only the usual call-connecting colours flashed and coruscated across it so far, but if something else sensed the signal and surfaced through them, he wouldn’t have time to close his eyes.
Never mind time to tell it he’d had a good reason for risking the call, really. He would have waited for any hour other than that one, the witching one, if he’d had time.
The apartment crackled like the burning core of an incense stick around him. He’d draped every sheet and towel he could get his hands on over the windows, and it wouldn’t help either. Not when he had that open portal, sleek, thin, vulnerable LCD, sitting right in front of him.
“Please,” he only mouthed. Making as little sound as possible, at least, was something that might do some real good. “Please, come on…”
The screen doused from colour to black so abruptly that he closed his eyes anyways. But the impression of a face wrung thin with worry, the same as his, in so many ways the same as his, had already burned itself onto his retinas.
Not a witching-hour burst of hostile colour or bulging eyes cracking through his screen. He opened his eyes on his sister’s face, just in time to see as well as hear her tinny, mic-popping tirade.
“Someone had better be dying. Did you even look at what time it is?”
If it had been any other time, he’d have matched her pop for pop. Pointed out that she’d spent their whole lives assuming he didn’t think anything through, and she’d been wrong at least half the time. But the sheets over his bedroom window, even triple-layered, were too thin to hold back every prickle and beam of the roving, blinding magenta outside.
“I know,” he said, as softly as the microphone would still pick up. “Listen, you have to get out of there. Now. They’re on their way.”
What little colour either of them carried in their faces drained from hers. “Are you sure?”
“I wouldn’t be calling you now if I wasn’t,” he said. “Go – call me once you’re safe.”
“That’s optimistic,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at a gloom she must have draped in sheets as well. “Shit. All right – I’m going. You should, too. If they’re moving on me-”
“I will,” he said. Would have meant, would have promised, if not for the slightest mad-red crack in the corner of the screen at that moment.
The slightest glimmer. It seemed he was going to have time for a little sick dread after all.
“Go,” he repeated. “I love you.”
And, before she could recover from that rare salvo, he cut the call. The screen didn’t go dark as it should have.
Red was roiling towards magenta, prying its way through the cracks of the colours the screen was capable of. He, like everyone he knew, had always assumed it would have to be quick.
Why would no one run otherwise? Who would sit and watch the worst and last thing they would ever see pushing its way out of their computer or phone, without even trying to break the screen first and better or book it out of the apartment?
Maybe because it was beautiful. Maybe because, if there was nothing that would stop it, sitting and watching was the last beautiful thing he could do. The screen cracked from magenta to something else.
He had the time, all of two seconds, but he didn’t scream.