The City Read online



  The City

  A Short Story

  by

  Wayne Haroutunian

  Copyright 2014 Wayne Haroutunian

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  You opened your eyes and saw space. Upon sitting up, you found yourself in a dark field. You couldn’t see the ground around you. All that you could see was the millions of stars above and the millions of electric lights of a city extremely far off in the distance. The thin layer of lights began at one point on the horizon and ended at another, and all else in every direction was pitch black and empty, like the emptiness above.

  You didn’t know why you were in that field or how you got there. You couldn’t recall what you had been doing earlier. There was no “earlier”. Neither did you know where you were. The emptiness in your mind was greater than the emptiness around you.

  You looked in the direction of the city-line, then turned to the opposite direction and faced the solid, distance-less black. You didn’t have to go to the city; you had a choice between that and venturing into the black. The reasonable thing to do, you knew, would have been to head for the electric city. However, you were becoming aware of an inner urge to head in the very opposite direction, away from the city. You couldn’t understand the urge, but you found yourself trusting it, and you didn’t understand that either.

  Towards the blackness you went, unable to see the steps you were taking.

  Almost immediately, your attention was drawn to something up in space.

  It was a red light. You halted to watch it as it moved slowly through the sky. You didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t, at that distance, and so continued walking into the attractive blackness.

  As you moved, you felt like you we're being watched. Upon looking up into the sky again, you found that the red light had since drawn nearer to you, nearer to the field. Your stomach swelled. You stopped again and decided you had better turn around and head for the city.

  You started moving towards the city, and, looking up, you swore the red light was receding. Continuing to walk, you watched closely to confirm your observation and found it to be true—the red light had know moved farther away from you, further up into space.

  You stopped.

  The red light stopped as well. You swore you saw that. It looked like it simply froze in its position up in space.

  Your stomach swelled some more. You also didn’t like how you were walking towards that city. There was a terror inside you regarding that city, and you did not want to continue another step towards it.

  While keeping an eye on the red thing above, you turned around and started back into the blackness again. Yet in doing this you were afraid also, because of what was above you.

  You started running, into the black. Because you couldn’t see a thing, it felt as though you were not running at all. As you ran, you looked upwards to see what the red light was doing.

  It had drawn nearer, nearer to the field. You thought again about turning around again and heading to the city, but you didn’t want to. Nothing could be worse than the city. You ran even faster, yet you couldn’t even tell if you were going faster, and you started to get dizzy, running through the nothingness...

  In your daze you thought you saw a faint red light beginning to show on the grass further ahead of you.

  You veered to the left and picked up speed.

  The red light grew stronger. You looked upwards and saw something, and you lost your legs and collapsed into the red, grassy ground.

  Dazed, you turned your eyes upward and saw a glowing red ball the size of a small house as it lowered itself silently to the ground. It stopped a few feet up from the grass, then, in the centre of it a small hole no larger than a gold coin opened up.

  After that, nothing more happened with the glowing ball. It merely floated before you, glowing, its small opening directed at you as though looking at you.

  You began to lose consciousness.

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