It’s not the darkness. It’s maybe not even the rain. Beyond the way the grays stack up on one another—the moon leaking down in graduating pales, reaching for the bay—there’s the weight of the street, your hand in mine, the cold, pushing us into one another, eyes forward. Where the light sticks, it’s bruised, lost in the mediation of arguments between colors best left to the sea. It’s all drowning with dry necks out here, and where are we going? Maybe that’s it more the anything. It’s darker, on ahead.

“I know how you’ll die,” I say.

I can’t see your face. There’s no shift in the way you hold me. “And when?” you say.

I nod. You tell me to take it back, but I can’t. “I can’t,” I say.

“Are you sure?” you say.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s darker, on ahead. Darker still, after that. It’s a sound like whales. There’s a time. There always was a time, but this is it, now, the time ahead. There’s a sound like whales, like too much water and too fast hands. It can’t be stopped, I think, not the way we’re walking, not the where.”

“But how?”

“Just is.”

You say you’re scared.

“It’s OK,” I say. “It’s OK. I’ll keep walking with you.”

If we hug, it’s between streetlamps, two cold things wringing themselves on themselves, lost so effectively in the thick darkness that when we kiss it’s like relearning the world from the mouth out, all rainwet and trembling. I try to tell you everything in that kiss, in the shaking of my lips, the pressure, the soft electricity the water conducts. I try to shallow my breathing and hear yours for the first time, again, but the more I try the more my lungs struggle. I’m not strong enough for this. Neither of us are. Why are we walking?

You say, “It’s not important why,” but I wasn’t speaking. Are you answering yourself? It doesn’t matter. Foot follows foot, splash and soaking shoe. The banners twist in the wind. They never ask why.

“They’re just banners, though,” I say.

Maybe you nod. Whatever you do, you tug in closer to me and we have to relearn how to walk. There are no headlights to make sense of the shifting shapes in the thin pools of yellow from the lamps above. We have eyes, though. We have eyes and eyes and eyes and we walk. How did you become so much stronger than me in this stretch? It feels like you’re pulling me.

“I can’t wait,” you say. “If it can’t be changed—”

I squint even though I already know every inch of up there, if only as a dream. “It’s darker, still, on ahead. This is only the beginning of it.”

So we kiss again. This time I’m sure you’ll see the truths I can’t find the words for, but it’s me who sees, instead. I see the red pillowcase, you on the old dryer outside some old back door waving it like a flag. No signal is returned in the distance. I see the mosquitoes. I see your feet, so small in memories. You ask if I’ll hold onto that for you. You whisper into my ear, or you bite it. Regardless, I say, “I will.”

It’s a sound like whales. The last of the lights is in sight, now. All darkness after that. Who would build a street like this? Who could live here?

If you smile, I don’t see it, but your voice has that shape in it. “Nobody lives out here,” you say, and I can see the truth of it.

No body. No thing. It’s only darkness. Even the moon sees no use in its presence, here, and it’s darker, still, on ahead.

“Strange,” you say, “how much color there still is.”

Some wet blue, some moth’s-wing gray; they survive the light’s abdication, somehow, painting the loose shapes of whales and thunderclouds on the void’s more substantial nothings.

“Do you hear it?” I say, but you’re gone from my side, now. I nearly fall in your absence, so much of how I’d stood till now so tied up in the balance of your weight. I call out, but there’s no speed left for a voice like mine. There’s only a sound like whales, a palette of darkness reserved for last moments, never intermissions.

Timestamp: 02.05.08 at 03:13 PM. Filed under: Fiction.