You should have listened to the PSA. I did. That's why I'm still here, behind you. But you're not. Not there. Not in your shell.
You should have listened. It meant you no harm. Nor did I. But the other thing...
It’s been three days since anything happened.
I don’t know whether I want anything to happen.
Three days, and I’ve already gone batty. Three days, and…
And I can’t even enter the living room. I guess I can. But I won’t. I can’t.
There’s eighty different envelopes on the ground. I used to receive about one letter a day. Never anything other than official stuff. Bills. Admissions. Notices for jury duty. But there it is. Three whole months worth of physical mail, all adorned with the names of people I know. All of them mocking me.
Like there’s four letter from Louis. I haven’t seen that guy in eight years. As far as I know, I will never see him again. Honestly, It would probably be preferable if I didn’t, considering he’s dead and all. But there’s four letters from him. Four letters in that same coarse stationary he used. He’d inherited a whole mess of it from his father, and he liked to write letters just as a way to steadily cut into the supply. And he did, and it was great, and…
And he’s dead. Very dead. Exceptionally dead. The kind of dead where I saw his still, rotting corpse with my own eyes. He’d been driven mad. One of many. Forever lost.
And then there’s his writing. Not lost. There. A chance to reaquaint myself with hopes and feelings I can scarcely remember. But I can’t touch them.
The malice is obvious. It would be hard to do something more pointed. Over half of the letters are from people who are dead, whose voices I desperately want to hear. So of course I’m tempted to just sidle up to one and open it, just for the chance, the slimmest chance that any of this is real.
But it’s not. I know that. There’s been screaming, constantly. Every day. At first there was so much of it that I couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from, or from whose throat the sound echoed. But it must have been most of them. ‘Anyone living in your household,’ was what the PSA said. Or something like that. Imagine having children at a time like this. You’d have to lock them in their rooms with their hands bound or something, just to make sure they didn’t accidentally open one of the letters.
Doom. Doom is what lies in the living room. So much doom. Each of them contains the rhombus. The rhombus. The rhombus.
What is the rhombus? A shape. Quite literally just a shape. A concept of a thing. The shadow an object casts on a wall under the light. It is that and nothing more. And yet, each hour all the devices come alive with the same statement, modified only by time. What is it? What does it do?
I don’t suppose it matters much, now does it? There’s lights going out. Whether the something is a rhombus, or a beast, or a killer with a human face, what can I do about it? There is something out there that says that we can take proactive steps to keep it away. So I did. Perhaps that something is lying. In fact, that something is almost certainly lying. But what does that really change about the situation?
Lights are going out. People are dying. Or maybe they are just going to sleep.
I think I’ll turn my lights out, too. I’ll huddle in my closet and try to close my eyes, pretend like all of this isn’t real. Like everyone else out there, I’ll fail. But I’ll try. And maybe that will be enough.
