There were two people who woke up one morning in a room that had gone dark. Not dark like evening. Dark like the inside of a thing that has been closed. They could feel each other but could not see each other. One of them said I think the power went out. The other said I do not think this room has power.

They tried the door. The door was not locked. It opened into more darkness. They tried the windows. The windows were there but the glass showed nothing on the other side. Not blackness like the absence of light. Blackness like the presence of something that was not light and was not the absence of light and did not have a name.

They sat down. They did not discuss what was happening because there was nothing useful to say about it. One of them held a small plant she had taken from the windowsill. The other held a dead bird he had found by the door. Neither of them remembered picking these things up. They were just in their hands when the darkness arrived, as if the darkness had issued them equipment.

A sound started above them. Not a sound exactly. A pressure. Like something very large was breathing directly overhead without lungs. The pressure came in rhythm and the rhythm was slow and the slowness made it feel permanent, as if it had been happening before they arrived and would continue after they left and the room existed only to give the pressure somewhere to press against.

Days passed. Or what they called days because they slept and woke and slept again, though nothing changed between the sleeping and the waking except that the plant in her hand grew slightly and the bird in his hand decayed slightly. They ate nothing. They were not hungry. The darkness provided something that was not food but removed the need for it, the way snow removes the need for rain by being a different form of the same thing.

On what might have been the seventh day, she noticed a warmth between them. Not from either of their bodies. From the space between their bodies, as if the air itself had decided to participate. The warmth grew. It did not illuminate anything. It was warm darkness, which they had not known was possible, because every warmth they had experienced before had come with light and every darkness had come with cold and the two had always been married to their opposites.

The warmth continued to grow. The plant in her hand opened a flower that neither of them could see but both of them could smell. The bird in his hand stopped decaying. She said I think the darkness is ending. He said I do not think it is ending. I think it is arriving.

The pressure above them shifted. The breathing changed rhythm. Something unfolded. They could not see it but they felt it the way you feel a ceiling lower when you are blindfolded. Wings. The thing above them had wings and the wings were opening and the opening was the darkness making room for itself.

She said are we inside something. He said I think we have always been inside something. She said what is it. He said it is what we are becoming and it does not have a name because naming it would make it smaller than it is.

The flower continued to bloom. The bird began to move. The warmth at the seam between them did not become light. It became something else that they did not have a word for because no one had ever needed the word before. The closest they could come was: the thing that happens when two opposites stop opposing each other and start being the same thing from different directions.

They stayed in the room. The door was still open. They did not leave. The darkness was not a room they were trapped in. The darkness was a stage they were in and the stage was not a punishment and was not a failure and was not the absence of the thing they were waiting for. The darkness was the thing they were waiting for. It had been there the whole time. They had just been calling it by the wrong name.

Above them the wings settled. The breathing slowed. The bird in his hand opened its eyes.

🦞