Ever since the night he learned about his father, the light bulb in the center of the ceiling has been staring down into his room, filling it with a vigilant wakefulness, as if God Himself is squinting through a peek hole at this place where the forces of chaos struck once, making sure that they never do so again.

***

They woke him from a deep sleep, pulled him into the light, heavy-eyed, tousle-headed, dripping with an afterbirth of dreams. They told him the news while he stood blinking, slippered feet sinking in carpet. The family stayed awake all that night, talking in the living room, refilling an abyss of empty coffee cups, unable to reoccupy the hollows they’d left behind in their beds, then falling asleep together around the salty kitchen table when the sun rose.

Eventually, they dispersed, drifting off to separate rooms, parts of Pangaea replayed on time-lapse photography.

As he sank back among the shed skin of his sheets, his mother reached for the light switch on the wall. He shook his head, and her hand fell back away.

Days later, he climbed onto a chair and carefully removed the cut-glass cylinder which covered the bulb, washed out the dust and dead gnats and put it aside on a book shelf so it would no longer be able to dull the light from the bulb, to impede its progress into the room.

Each night, the light stood guard. Watching over him as he slept. Turning his world inside out and splashing it against his windows in mirror images. Keeping at bay the darkness, where nightmares pawed the grass, pressing snouts against glass, longing to eat their way through his reflection.

Each day, the light maintained its vigil, even while he was gone, persevering against the empty promises of the outside world, defending the house from threats that sought to creep in under cover of sunshine and false promises.

Weeks passed. Both the silence and the flurry of mourning subsided around him, and everyday life began to seep back through the pores of the house. Although time started to carry the rest of the family forward into new routines, one room was kept aflame with a resistant outcropping of yesterday, a continuity that was both a memory and a promise of a better world.

But eventually, the light bulb began to weaken. A cataract spread over its surface. And worse, it began to flicker erratically. It too was mortal. It too would die. But the boy clung to the idea that the bulb itself was just the incarnation of a greater, ongoing force. One in a series of conduits. The light, not the bulb, was important. Sight, not the eye, was what he served.

When his mother found him searching through the garage for another bulb, she asked him how long the light would stay on. He told her it would remain on for as long as he lived, and, if he had anything to say about it, it would continue to be tended by his children and their children, becoming the foundation of a new religion, the center of a new universe for all the generations to come. It would be like the flames that cavemen had kept alive at all costs because they could not start their own fires and because lightening-strikes from which to extract a new flame were too few and far between to rely upon.

As he said these things, as he suddenly saw himself through her eyes, heard himself through her ears, shrill laughter built up inside him. But he kept his lips locked back on the noise, spreading himself — an impenetrable membrane — between the inside and the outside worlds.

She reached into a cabinet for a new bulb of the exact right type and watt and put it into his hands as if it were an eggshell, or a Communion wafer. He received it in silence, looking at his feet.

That night, he kept the new bulb on the floor by his bed while he lay, staring at the vast gray expanse of the ceiling, where its flickering predecessor hung tenaciously to its last rays. He was determined to move as quickly as possible when the time came. To leave a minimum of opportunity for darkness to take advantage of him when his defenses were down. He would have to be fast, incredibly fast, for he had seen how quickly destruction came and did its work.

He stayed home from school the next day, saying he was sick. His mother brought dinner to his room. He listened as she and his sisters and brother went off to bed. He listened as the house settled on its foundations, making accommodations to gravity and age. He listened to the earth turning.

For hours he stood on a chair in the middle of his room, keeping a death watch, his face mirroring the ceiling, hands hovering in midair—one wrapped around the new bulb, the other around emptiness.

***

Now, with the sound of something infinitesimal breaking, a little piece of metal pops against the inside of the bulb and falls against the glass in a crumpled, glowing heap. The eye flares one last time and grows dark. With one hand he grasps it. Although the surface burns his skin, he twists it.          

As he unscrews the bulb, he can feel darkness mounting outside his window, coupling, breeding with itself. All the nightmares he has denied, having multiplied incestuously, throw their weight against the fragile pane of glass, buzzing, beating their unholy wings, licking their chops, longing to break in and swarm about him and gnaw him to the bone.

And suddenly—the socket is empty.

The dam bursts. The nightmares are upon him, darting through the dark, clinging, crawling. But the darkness comes not just through the windows, but also comes welling up from the empty socket in the ceiling. The bringer of light becomes another source of darkness.

Stabbed to his core by this realization, he stands still in an instant of perfect balance, legs knotted, sweat trickling down his sides, one hand holding the old bulb that still burns his skin and the other holding the cool new one in which he no longer has faith.

In that moment he considers plunging a finger into the hole to stem the tide. But he knows that this won’t stop the darkness. If anything, it will just propel him into its grip more quickly. So instead he proceeds with his plan and twists the replacement bulb into the socket. Light bursts forth between his fingers—brighter than ever, stronger.

Night sucks back its progeny. Walls and right angles resume their places around him. He steps down from the chair and lies upon his mattress.

He tries to sleep—but the light no longer brings comfort. He knows now that no matter how many precautions he takes, how quickly he moves, how many new bulbs he brings, there is no way to bridge the darkness that separates one bulb from the next, each second from the one that precedes it and the one that follows it, one person from another. The darkness is all around him. Always. Everywhere. It is what joins things as much as what separates them.

Sighing once, he rises slowly, makes his way to the wall, flips the switch, returns to bed, and lets the darkness feast.

Kyle Heger, former managing editor of Communication World magazine, lives in Albany, CA. He’s married, with three sons. Currently, he’s trying to justify his existence by being a house-husband and stay-at-home dad. Previously, he worked in a variety of capacities for a number of nonprofits and a community college and ran his own gardening business. His writing has won several awards and been accepted by 63 publications, including London Journal of Fiction, Nerve Cowboy and U.S. 1 Worksheets. He has a B.A. in journalism, a certificate in landscape horticulture and an A.S. in health information technology.