SCAPE — a story by ollie francis
The dark always crouches low to the ground. Bent knees, hands gripping to rocks to anchor it in place. If it lets go, it will be lost, you see. It is often thought of as a threatening darkness, creeping and clawing its way towards you to rise up and swipe at the small of your back when it is turned, grabbing you right between the shoulder blades with its cold hand. We are born with an innate fear of it. The Dark. The Enemy.
But we are wrong. We forget that the dark was there with us in our first nine months. It nurtured us, wrapped us in the amniotic embrace of love. It was our warmth and our comfort.
It is only once we emerge, screaming into the light, that the darkness is torn from us, fingers pried back, arm twisted away, screaming.
Maybe we fear its revenge. *You left me*, it whispers, a lovers breath before the knife. We fear what it might do.
But we forget its delicacy. We forget the fragility of its limbs and the permeability of its skin. A knock from a single photon sends it reeling, holding its hand to the bullet wound on its breast. Hit, hurt, hunted by the light.
The boy knows this. He has moved ahead of the crowd. He stands on his own at the edge and sees the dark scrambling for shelter before the approaching dawn. He sees it, desperate, across the landscape, searching for escape. Panic in the face of destruction. The light burns at the edges.
The boys sees and he knows: the darkness doesn’t snarl; it whimpers.
Originally published on Tumblr