Electricity

One red block sat atop blue and one yellow beside them. There was violent then blue again, then orange atop blue. The construct towered with miniature possibility, a conduit, a channel, a limb enabling a broadcast of influence. Two pairs of hands tiny and pale with fingers like caterpillars but bald and smooth.

The basement walls of stone seeped earth agate as the void. The twins turned their heads of similar hue to the window above. They gazed beyond window to the night behind it, through denser velvet of darker shade. Sedan on highway hurtling through black glinting the grin of the crescent moon. The vehicle colourless yet black then white in curious tandem, not flashing, never flashing, but shifting like water, like conversation. The sky was archaic, the moon most tilted.

And the sedan hurtled still. The driver, his hands gripping the steering wheel at a certain time, was not drowsy but deadened by the monotony of the landscape. The crooked trees which painted the horizon like Stygian stencils, the forest thick, impenetrable, a world apart, within, without.

The driver felt the passenger to his right stir and whimper. He glanced over at her and, as if in response, she languidly opened her eyes and blinked. She blinked again. Yawned. Extended her limbs as far as possible and stretched them. The radio skittered in and out of frequency, out of phase, back again, and the wailing strains of steel guitars resumed.

"It was the strangest dream," she said softly to no one in particular.

"Oh?"

She nodded blearily. "You were in it."

He said nothing, continued to watch the licorice night.

"You were standing in the kitchen at home, it was midday." She rubbed her eyes. "It was like I was watching but you never acknowledged my presence."

He adjusted the temperature of the air conditioning.

"The doorbell sounds, you set down your coffee mug and go to the door. I follow you but cannot discern who it is because you're blocking the doorway. You return to the kitchen with a moderately sized cardboard box and set it on the counter."

He glances at her then just out of habit and her eyes are on him, fully awake. He smiles anxiously but she does not return it. Her fingertips massage her neck but this does not seem to ease her.

"I'm glad you woke me," she confessed.

"I didn't."

She frowned at this and looked away, sat straighter in her seat. She flicked the radio off with fingers dipped in scarlet polish and observed the darkness around them. The death of steel guitars reverberated in memory for a time until that too faded.

"So what was in the box?" he inquired at last.

She regarded him with confusion. "I don't know. You never opened it."

He smirked and looked at her with amusement. "A bit anticlimactic wouldn't you say?"

She returned a smile but the smile was forced. "You received a call on your mobile and moved to the patio outside. It was suddenly night and the neighborhood was alight with multi-coloured lights like it was Christmas but it wasn't Christmas. You end your phone call without saying goodbye and return to the kitchen but there is a presence in the room and only I can sense it. You wander the rooms of the house in darkness oblivious to the shadows and finally you turn to me..."

Neither of them saw it. The blur of brownish white, the explosion of hooves, the silent creature of taut muscle and modest coat. The sedan buckled, compressed, spewed glass and fur, metal and crimson, and halted in quiet. The vacuum of sound to mark an anomaly perhaps, a considerate pause in the machinery of consequence. Nothing moved but the sedan's engine sputtered.

The conclusion a palette of bleeding colours, mixed and entwined, fate and chance and foreign will alike. Red atop blue and yellow beside. Violent then blue, then orange atop blue. The sedan was fire, the moon was grinning, tree stenciled sky, and two pairs of eyes cloaked by feathery night.