Stewart Dawson
Obscurity
This story was written in darkness. It wasn’t the kind of darkness you find on an unlit street late at night. It wasn’t the kind of darkness you find in a deep cave. And it wasn’t the kind of darkness you might find in a basement at night when you are down there alone and the only light bulb burns out. This is a kind of darkness that only occurs hidden in the mind or the heart or the soul. Intangible Mandelbrot-like infinities: no matter how you focus or how close you zoom in to it, the darkness only grows and repeats itself. This darkness becomes a complicated mathematical set.
And, again, this towering forest calls me in. I stand in the shadows; in awe in the shadows. The trees force themselves toward the sky and wrap me in infinite fractal shadows.
In the shadows, I make light come from the machines of man and out of the shadows her face emerges. The light that falls upon her face falls upon it perfectly because her face is perfect. And she calls to me. Her voice filters through the trees of the forest and carries out over the water and beyond out into the night. I stay back in the shadows and listen. I could easily be talking about ten different people, but I’m really talking about just one.
I make light come from the machines of man because she is there. She performs because it is the perfect thing for her to do. And I fall hard into the shadows. The first time I stood behind these machines and fell this hard among the shadows was many years ago. A good deal of my life has passed since then.
One time the shadows of a moonlit night fell across the snow and someone said “Thank you, sir.”
Once there was a little stage in a very old church and a single narrow spot light dimmed out and made shadows on someone saying, “Atom, atom, what a beautiful word.”
Another time, the shadows fell on a rock, big enough for two to sit on, high up on a cliff overlooking the water. Wine and cheese and crackers were in the shadows.
And one time, I was lost in the shadows of a moss covered ledge, on an island away from the world, shadows that only two would ever see.
Once the shadows of the trees fell across a sandwich I was eating. The sandwich had a cookie tagging along behind. Someone came and sat next to me and said, “Do you like me enough to give me your cookie?”
For those brief moments, the machines of God pierced the shadows and I was in the light. For those moments, I was washed by the machines of loving grace and I felt perfect among the trees and bluffs and churches. But they were all just for a moment and I always fell back into the infinite, fractal shadows. I guess I always felt safer there.