She Walked In Darkest Sunshine (Constrained Writing Contest Entry)

It was beyond glorious belief, beyond the possible, the imagined. A single pill, and everything had shifted, like a beautiful inverted painting, the dark shone with the light she always knew was there, the light revealed it true shade of dark. She had spent her life revelling in the hidden light of dark, and now, a single pill, and anyone could see it. No one had believed she could do it, no one had funded her. She had worked into the early hours, pinching and squeezing time and money, and she had finally done it. Four pills.

She was calling it a pill, it was so much more. A tiny implant that navigated the bloodstream to burrow into the brain and augment perception. Human vision is so limited by our power to process what we see, she had removed that limitation. A single pill, and the night shift became the day shift, the sunlight, sweet darkness in embrace.

She was sourly aware of the commercial applications that would be found for her beautiful sunlit dark. Yet despite this, in some ways she revelled in the prospect of receiving recognition. She had unlocked the possibility to see the truth, darkness became light, the absence of all that is, light became dark, overwhelmed by blurring of infinite colour. Everything had shifting, what was green, became everything but green, the sky shone with the water-coloured infusion of everything but blue.

Her unlit room was filled with the bright white light of nothing, the very air seemed to glow with it, drowning out the sight of everything. Flicking the switch, drenched the room in black, thickest around the bare bulb, somehow transparent, revealing the petrol shimmer of everything but brown in her wooden floor.

She sat down on the small fleece rug, the black fur curling in pale, translucent white tufts, letting the darkness that was light wash through her. It felt so pure, so real, as though she was sitting in reality for the first time. She held out her hand, emintating ripples of coloured light, her softly illuminated skin radiated infinite colours, twisting and moving, blending to new shades as she turned her hand. She glowed a gentle, warm shade, holding her hand over her arm, she could feel a sense of her being rising from her skin. It was a drugged, heady feeling, woozy and wavy, warm in washing waves that struck a chord inside her, resonating through her being. This was she, the her inside her, dancing on the surface. It had always been there, unseen, her aura.

She felt enamoured, love drunk on the spectacular reality she sat in.

The hairs prickled along her arms, rising up the back of her neck, the dark air like electricity on her skin. She rose, curiosity burning through her. What else? What else could she look at with true eyes?

She grabbed her coat, and made her way to the street. Rain was falling, light clouds were punctuated by thin patches of dark sunlight, the rain had dark tones, shimmering and shifting down. Sparkling darkness from pale clouds.

The people seemed luminescent, colourful arrays with an almost neon glow in the darkness of day. She could feel the essence rising from their skin as they bustled past her. She had a vague awareness of how drugged up she might look, stood still on the busy pavement, awe and wonder on her face as she became momentarily absorbed in each buffeting passerby.

A flash of worry, consuming anxiety, tangible, echoing inside her, then slipping away.

A single moment of tender affection, a sense of protection, tightly gripping hands sweeping by.

Immersion in their thoughts and feelings. Passing whirlwinds of emotion and expression spilling over from everyone who knocked into her. A beautiful kaleidoscope of humanity.

Then it hit her, a bubbling moment of distorted happiness that filled her like nausea. A single flash of tearing limbs, the vibrations of twanging tendons shuddering through her. It was staggering, she could barely focus her eyes on the face, downcast, hurrying past her. The suffocating, sickening waves of depravity knocked into her, so many mixed feelings, broken snapshots of broken bodies. Fragmented moments of flickering thoughts, slipping through her fingers.

It was over, he was gone.

She stood reeling, stunned in the crowd. Unable to step out of the assaulting flow of windows into other lives. She saw such beauty, such horror, felt it as though it were her own. She dropped to her knees on the wet pavement, the cold damp seeping through her jeans.

She was unable to reconcile the crevices of her true reality with the crashing beauty that swam around her. As the light cast dark, and the dark cast light, the corners and the shadows of the world came into sight. She had seen things beyond the capabilities of her mind.

---

The trembling woman who paramedics found sobbing on the street, kicked and trampled by unwitting foot traffic, could only babble and stutter, backing away from helping hands. Words beyond her. She had no ID on her, just a single brass key in her coat pocket. They had no way of knowing who she was, or what she was going through as they bundled her, flinching with every touch, into an ambulance.

She lives in a care home now, twenty years on, still afraid of physical contact, still insisting on sleeping with the lights on, the power of speech lost to her.

I am not sure how I feel about these stories with more certain endings. I have deliberated over whether I should keep the last line in or not, I do like the idea of her lost in her own version of reality though.

This is my entry to @svashta 's Constrained Writing Contest - the constraint was to write a story where light and dark are reversed. Check out the contest for the full prompt.

Find all the entries under the tag #constrainedwriting

Photo taken and edited by me (I say edited, I didn't do much to it)