Between Street Lights: Asenath's Song

[Between Street Lights]

The city had been receiving complaints about that avenue's shoddy street lamps for the last three weeks. If they hadn't done anything about the potholes, cynics groused, why would they do something about the lights that flickered and went out more often than they consistently worked? Some nights, the lights were more like a symphony of fireflies in the in the deepest dark than anything functional.

This was the very same street where the subconscious humming tune was most noticeable. It wasn't there while speaking. It wasn't there while attention was actively focused on something. But the moment that thoughts began to drift, the moment when her heart began to ache, the moment when her anger threatened to get the better of her, it was there. Always.

It wouldn't have been such a problem if it wasn't the most convenient way to get home, and one of the best-lit and least potholed roads in the neighborhood. What a pisser that was...

The sun had set half an hour ago, and the lamps were even less functional than they usually were. The air was cool and damp, but it somehow held a charge to it. The indefinable tune that wasn't from any song she'd ever heard was stronger in the back of her mind tonight, harder to ignore, and the world had a strange cast to it sometimes as though it had been dipped in bronze. From behind her in an alley she had just passed by, a trash can rattled violently against a brick wall, followed immediately by a sharp curse that was swiftly muffled.

[Leetah]

The delicious dark of dusk’s damp hand ushered away day at last, casting a strangled gold glow across the city as it fought to fall behind the setting sun. In this manner, another autumn evening arrived in Asenath’s city—another autumn afternoon had hemorrhaged warmth and color so that another autumn evening could take its paling place. It was serially exquisite… and tonight, it was seriously strange. With this particular evening’s arrival had come the threat of thunderstorms—and something else. On nights tempered by tempests, nights like this, when everything is bronzed and bone-edged and beautiful, Asenath liked to dawdle. But tonight, she felt fairly drawn to do so; tonight she felt a keen need to wander beneath street lights.

She liked to walk, really…but at the pace she favored, it was more like dawdling. Past shuttered windows and graffiti murals, across pedestrian bridges spanning the forked tongue of one thin river, Asenath drifted slowly. Old Panasonic headphones drowning out background garbage, she slipped past a bricked-up middle school to the opening peals of “Without You I’m Nothing” and shuffled lazily through the shadows of an underpass just as Molko and Bowie wailed the last few lines together.

It was then, during the pause between songs, that Asenath heard the garbage can rattle—and the subsequent muffled curse. And it was then that Asenath froze. Pausing mid-step, she pulled the headphones down around her neck and scanned her surroundings. Wary, inky-dark eyes told her suddenly that she was on that street again. The one she always seemed to find, no matter how long or serpentine her path. Just like last time (and the time before that, and the time before that…), she felt her skin prickling—but just a little, and not altogether unpleasantly. She couldn’t decide, really, if it was a prickling or a slithering or maybe even a rustling (like silk across bare arms). But it was slightly unsettling…

That sensation, combined with the distinct feeling that she was being watched (or had been watched some moments ago) put her on edge. And as she noticed one of the street lights start to gently flicker, she swore under breath.