The Dark

A short story about the dark. It's my first short story, I'd love feedback.

I woke up, and there was only darkness. Unending, all-enveloping, unexplainable darkness.
Presently, the bed beneath me is my only connection to reality, my only source of grounding against this all-encompassing, ancient force of nothingness. I lay for a while, my brain not reconciling my new predicament, a darkness so extreme everything outside my immediate grasp didn’t exist, a darkness unlike anything I’d ever seen, a darkness so all-encompassing no color, shape, or word could even come close to describing it. Eventually, I get up, moving my torso off the safety of my bed and further into the unending force of the dark. I pause, wondering whether my feet will be met with anything at all. Thankfully, they were, and the floor was added to my small but vital list of trustworthy forces in this unearthly predicament.

Regaining my bearings, I fumbled my way to a matchbox located in the cupboard of my kitchen. I struck the match and was met with the familiar sight of my house. I then lit a candle. Several. Placing these sources of comfort strategically around my house, I attempted to regain a sense of control. In this familiar landscape, every sense of normality had been taken from me, the core of the house had been stripped of its life, and I was left with its hollow remains. The electricity did not work, the sink was dry, and the windows displayed absolutely nothing. Not even the light of my flames was permitted into the unending void outside my house.


I walked through my living room and approached my front door. Once a connection to the outside world, it now served as protection from the force outside my walls, the endless nothing that surrounded me and my house. I opened it cautiously, staring into space, so large, so vast, my simple brain couldn’t even come close to understanding it. I launched a hand into the dark, then a foot, stretching, groping, hoping for anything to grasp on to, any proof that there was something outside. Nothing answered. I closed off the nothingness again and retreated to my house.


Entering my dimly lit bedroom, I contemplated my options. Food wasn’t an issue; I had enough to last a lifetime thanks to the leftover stores of my grandmother. My grandmother. Though the day had just begun, the absence of everything had taken the thought of my earlier life out of my mind, not as a loss of memory, but as a detachment from it. How can anything else have existed outside of this void? In the presence of such a powerful nothing, how could there have been something?


I have to ration my resources. I have candles, but they only last a few hours, and if they go out, nothing would separate me from the inescapable void outside my door. I need to keep light for as long as possible. I got up and raced through my house, extinguishing every flame and collecting their containers until only one stood. I placed it at the front of my room, a glimmering shrine of what things once were, a dim space of normality, the god of this new world.

Not wanting to extinguish the flame or make it go any faster, I decided not to move. I sat perfectly still on my bed and quietly looked out at my surroundings. The things I could see were now narrowed to my bed, its frame, a wooden dresser, and the candle perched upon it.


The time that passed was uncountable and unbelievably long. I stared deeply into the flickering flame, my concentration broken only by the vessel that contained the force I was staring into, melting, slowly being destroyed by the very thing it was meant to hold. At some point, the flame flickered and died, leaving a trail of melted wax down my dresser and onto my floor, a sick memorial of its earlier form. In the middle of this decomposed shell, I placed another candle, replacing the last with an identical replica that was destined to meet the same fate.


This process repeated endlessly, the only reminder of what had happened before being the ever-growing pile of wax in front of me. I wanted to do something, anything. I wanted to fight the void, defeat this ancient force, but you can’t destroy something that doesn’t exist. You can’t destroy nothing.

The fear of being thrown into that dark expanse was so great that I was completely paralysed. Staring into the flame, I prayed for this torture to end and grappled with the repercussions of what would happen if it actually did. Eventually, my mind grew weary, unable to handle the insurmountable burden of understanding an absolute nothing. I started hallucinating things onto the dark, my mind trying to project some form of meaning into the endless meaninglessness that surrounded me.

Spiders crawled on the ceiling and down the walls. I didn’t move. A man crept into the frame of my bedroom door, staring menacingly, slowly creeping around the weak field of light cast by my singular candle, ready to strike as soon as it went out. I didn’t move. A voice beckoned me to leave the safety of my room, to join it in the infinite expanse of nothing outside of me. Still, I didn’t move. Enduring this torture was still a better outcome than nothing; this way, I had something to focus on, something to be scared of. I couldn’t be scared of nothing.


Eventually, something terrible happened. Through my delirium, I almost didn't notice the flickering of one of my candles signalling its end. I grabbed the matchbox, quickly struck another match, and reached for my stack of candles. Nothing was there. All of my sources of light had been used, and all that was left was a grotesque glob of white goo, spilling as far as its contents allowed it to. I had to brave my house once again.


Striking another match, I crept slowly, not wanting the fragile flame to go out, searching for anything it could latch on to to stay alive. A stack of papers was first. I placed them into the flame one at a time, keeping the fire on a metal sheet so as not to burn through the floor and into the void. They didn’t last long, only providing minutes of relief from my suffering. The furniture was next: pillows, blankets, and carpets, all lit one at a time, their new purpose now being the means by which I destroyed them.

Clothes were thrown into the flame, polyester lingering, clumping, and bubbling under the heat. Even the clothes I wore were thrown into the mix, bringing me one step closer to the insurmountable nothing outside of me. As they burned, I scrambled desperately for another source of flame. Blindly entering my room, I scavenge my drawers and retrieve the last source of paper I had left. I grabbed my birth certificate, passport, letters, diplomas, and threw them into the flame. Once vital pieces of personal identification are now reduced to what their physical structure could bring me, parts of myself, who I am, being destroyed for a short glimpse of normality that they once held. I felt parts of myself burning in that flame, but even that wasn’t enough to satisfy its hunger.


Whole pieces of furniture were now being thrown in a desperate attempt to keep the fire alive.
Chairs, tables, and cabinets were engulfed by the flame, their forms breaking down and crumbling under the heat. Eventually, the flame grew so large it burned a hole through the ceiling, and that too was set ablaze. Slowly, the fire crept across my roof and down the walls, burning down my only means of separation from whatever waited outside of them, or whatever didn’t.


Desperately grabbed a gallon jug from my kitchen and doused myself in water, making a wet platform which could not be touched by the flame. I watched as the fire engulfed my house.
Disintegrating everything in its path. But this time it didn’t leave anything behind. No ash, no glob of wax, no way to reconcile what it once was. I was alone on a platform of my own making.

I sat there, naked, lonely, and afraid. Now the separation from the thing I was so desperately running from became thinner than ever, undone by the very means I used to escape. Only one thing was left to me. My matchbook. I brought it to eye level and started to strike the final matches. One by one, I struck, letting each burn down to the tip of my fingers until they were burned, boiled, and bleeding. The flesh was singed off, and all that was left were the nerve endings below. Yet I continued, the pain of my flesh infinitely better than the pain of being thrust into an eternal nothing.


I was now down to my last match. I waited lifetimes, though the passage of time meant nothing to the endless dark that swallowed me. I struck the final match. It burned, and as it did, I lit the last source of fire I had left, the matchbox. As I watched the final source of light disappear from my world, a sudden, all-consuming desperation to keep it overtook me.

In a last-ditch attempt to cultivate the flame, I mutilated myself, ripping great chunks of hair excruciatingly from the scalp and throwing them into the flame. They dissolved alarmingly fast. Even the very destruction of myself was not enough for this force. Frantically, I bent, giving my eyes, eyebrows, and skin to the flame, but it was in vain. Primal instincts pulled my huddled, naked body away from the source of pain and out into the nothing. I stumbled, tripping over the platform and into the void. I looked up at the platform on which I had stood just seconds before as it too succumbed to the flame. I fell an incredible distance for an incredible time, the burning platform growing impossibly further until eventually I was engulfed in true nothing. Nothing separated me from the void of dark endlessness all around me.


I sank into the impossibly deep darkness, my thoughts being the only thing keeping me company. That too fades. The mind grows tired of casting shape into the meaningless abyss. Without perception of anything new, the mind forgets what it once was, what it once knew. Yourself doesn’t exist in a vacuum; something can’t exist in nothing. I fell forever. I was forever. Everything faded until I became the very force I was in. All I knew was nothing, all I heard was nothing, all I could do was nothing. My environment overtook me.
I became nothing.