We counted days by the automatic porch light outside our apartment. Sensor activated, the bulb flashed on once the sun vacated the sky. Our living room was awash in the artificial glow coming through the plastic slats of our cheap blinds. Some days, we sat with baited breath, looking on as the other lights in the complex clicked on, one by one. The light was the only event we could wait on with certainty. It was a small joy; all other aspects of life had reached a standstill. Some days, we were caught off guard by the light, and we deflated, knowing that another day had slipped past us unnoticed. Eventually, we gave up counting days and just let the light delineate day from night.
Nights passed in tosses and turns, fitful snatches of disturbed sleep. The light radiated so brightly that the blinds glowed as if it were always dawn. I slept and woke in limbo. Neither my roommate nor I owned curtains; they had never made it into the budget. I once tried to hang a blanket over the window with thumb tacks, but it was so thin that light streamed through just the same.
The light was supposed safety. Cost-effective and eco-efficient assurance that cut through the Appalachian nights. But all we ever got were spiders scrawling moth-catching designs and a number of burglaries that never got investigated. Our downstairs neighbor had her car broken into for a half-empty carton of cigarettes. Some others got broken into for spare change.
The long-limbed leasing agent said it is for our own good that the lights stayed on, but it was just policy made by the landlords who lived in a different state. They got to pretend to be protectors while threatening tenants with fines should anything happen to the lights. It was their assurance, not ours. They’d fine anyone who added an extra lock to their door either.
Sometimes we liked to watch things with wings dance in the glow after dark. Humming softly until caught in the well-placed webs. The spiders oblige in the free meal, having made such a fortunate home in the harsh glow. It is all we can do hurry outside and untangle brittle wings from sticky silk, to hope they fly far, far from here. But how foolish it would be to expect them to evade for long. There had been a time when we were entranced by their shining certainty too.
Jade Braden is an author and artist, based in Ohio. She is currently working on her undergraduate creative writing thesis at Ohio University and often explores gothic, religious, feminist, and queer themes in her writing.