Grains
By: Chance Hensley/[Tekkon KinKreet]
Dec. 14, 2010

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The scenery so bright and warm, felt as if it were ruining his tear soaked eyes. What pain, though, could top what he had already endured? It was a nagging sensation in comparison, a mere annoyance. Something he could deal with, and rather easily at that.

Quickly, he shuttered and locked every window in the house. Next, he drew the blinds, making sure what little light dared trespass into his shrine of darkness would be quickly smothered.

Darkness.

He wondered, briefly, why he had always treasured the glare of the sun. Why he didn't instead embrace the coolness and simplicity of the dark. It was easily manageable, much more so than light. Light had a tendency to invade. No, perhaps tendency was the wrong word. An obligation, a compulsion.

He demonstrated this to himself by lighting a candle and watching as the flame quickly grew, the light snaking its way across the floor, under tables, and through the glass in a grandfather clock, until it reached the wall. He imagined cancer worked in much the same way, working its way bit by bit through the human body until it ran into the only boundary it knew, the world outside the skin.

Smiling, he pinched the flame with his thumb and index finger, casting himself into the darkness once again.

Light, the mighty interloper, destroyed with barely a thought.

In this place, unlike in most areas of his life, he would control the happenings. There would be no surprise, no treachery. No further harm. He would stay here and nurse his scars until they were less than that, less even than a memory. They would stew with him, and within him, in this darkness until they gave up the ghost and disappeared, never again able to rear their ugly heads in his life. Never again would they have the ability to turn simple monotony and comfortable familiarity into overbearing dread and crippling sadness.

In the dark, he fumbled his way through the sparsely furnished room to a cabinet set beside the front door. The cabinet contained a chess board set. A red and black checkered board on the bottom shelf, neatly placed white marble and black onyx playing pieces on the middle, and at the top, the object he had been intent on retrieving. A medium sized glass and wood hour glass, used to time the chess players moves.

His hand went straight to the piece, having known it's exact location from retrieving it a million times before, so he could set the board to play chess with....

NO

Best not to think of that.

Seemingly of their own accord, his fingers wandered to the marble pieces, momentarily caressing the white king. They next floated their way across the shelf, his mind calling out the pieces as his fingers brushed over their profile. Knight here, rook there, then his favorite and most used, the bishop. When his fingers found the black queen, they lingered for a splint second, before snatching the piece out and throwing it against the wall behind him. Black, a fitting color for her.

Angry at himself for allowing his thoughts to wander, he slammed the cabinet doors and walked to the middle of the room. Here, there stood a knee height coffee table next to a small love seat. He sat the hour glass in the middle of the table, then sat down himself. The matches he had used to light the candle moments ago were in his pocket, so he took one out and lit it, laying it on the table behind the hour glass. The sand dropped slowly to the bottom, ticking off the seconds in a minute until he had to flip it again.

He did this for nearly a half hour, lighting a new match when needed, doing nothing but counting seconds, trying to match them to the sand. Only three times was he what he considered successful.

When he was about to light the last match, he was startled to the point of jumping by a knock at the door.

He had been blankly going about his business, avoiding thought. His head filled with blissful nothingness aided by the surrounding darkness, focused only on the hour glass. It had felt good, until this rude interruption. He knew that if he simply waited for this sudden caller to become bored, or decide that no one was home, he could return to his paradise of naught. And so he waited.

To his annoyance however, the knocking became more insistent.

With each new rap it became louder, more pronounced, until he felt it was echoing in his skull. Angry, he yelled for them to stop. To go away and leave him in peace.

He was surprised when his shout was met by a feminine voice he knew all to well.

The question now was whether he would remain in his carefully constructed world of sweet nothing laced with perfect darkness, or open the door to the encroaching light.

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