A Refracted Truth

by Mizuki Yamamoto

You strike a match.

It is neither to see better in the dark or for warmth. You are beyond such basic desires. You strike a match with glee. For pleasure. For no reason but the sensation – to have and to hold what wasn’t. To feel more than nothing. To be lit in the light of something and to pretend you are the source of all.

Above, the wolf is as large as a cumulonimbus. Its eyes glint as lightning strikes. The sky is a serpent-worm, a shapeless writhing shadow of a god nobody believes in anymore.

These are the truths, unseen over our heads. Like dreams, they grow. Like nightmares, they linger. Behind your eyelids, the wolf grins, teeth tearing a hole.

Something’s in the air these days, your neighbors say, and you have a sense they don’t mean the smoke or the ash.

It is easy to assume things about air, a blank canvas for projects of human imagination and for refracted perceptions. A place where mere suspicions of the threat of violence can be conjured, then made invisible.

The wolf howls in the eye of the serpent storm. All is obscured by the scorch of the earth from your fingers. Hidden, stars fall as mercury in a tube.

You hold a piece of cardboard over your head to ward off the feeling of the sky falling down onto you. You are human and as such, a fool. You don’t notice when an ember lands on your cardboard, alighting like snow. Your eyes are on the sky in a blaze in the distance, the future suddenly, inevitably uncertain.

Lightning crackles and suddenly you see. The wolf as wide as the horizon, its fur a wild mid-night. The serpent, the sky, a god.

Your hair is on fire and when the wolf opens its mouth, you are falling, as into a bottomless hole. Your face aglow and your species, a cult of arsonists.

You cry for the wolf, for forgiveness from these forgotten gods.
You have forgotten the match.

In the crimson dark, a bird calls.
And then the rain.

The rain extinguishes all.

Mizuki Yamamoto is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. During the day Mizuki works on climate action. In her spare time, she worries about climate collapse and in her writing, she explores humanity on the brink, or simply people in strange places and strange times. Mizuki’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming at SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge, Lost Balloon, Your Impossible Voice, HAD, and elsewhere. Find her at mizukiwrites.carrd.co.