93 days
It had been 93 days since the sun left the sky. At first it was the animals that went crazy, their millennia-long habits ruined by a perpetual night. The nocturnal creatures emerged, never to return home, and they wandered the earth in an unending frenzy of constant awakened state.
The daytime animals never emerged, and we all realised how much we missed them. The twittering of the birds and skittering of rodents left the ambient world a quiet place.
As for us humans. We lasted surprisingly long until we descended into madness.
First it didn’t seem so bad. The consistent cosiness of electric lights illuminating the perpetual dimness brought a sense of consistency and order to a life so often ruled by seasons and weather. Instead, we now just had a constant cool gloom and lack of concern about what to wear. There was little choice anymore.
But then the plants stopped growing, the farm animals stopped behaving, and there’s only so much factory-produced processed junk you can endure before your body cries for something that’s been exposed to, well, exposed to something other than artificial light and atmosphere.
I looked in the mirror one day, the bare, glowing bulb in the ceiling casting a dim glow across my reflection. I was so pale. My eyes sullen, my skin pocked and pitted. I looked a shadow of my former self. Everywhere I went, others shared the same pallid appearance, staring at each other through grim, sullen sockets.
Humanity hasn’t always been the most positive species as a whole, but we all slowly became miserable, cantankerous individuals. The sun had brought us warmth and joy, and there was none left.
Then the violence began. Well, to be precise, it increased the longer the darkness lingered. Already used to shutting ourselves in our dwellings, we barricaded ourselves from the marauding mobs, hiding from the shouting and screaming outside. Shielding ourselves from the sounds of pain and aggression and vented frustration.
World leaders appeared in the media, pleading and begging for an end, deploying forces who were no better than those they were trying to control. Then came the longest night of our lives. Death and destruction ran with no bounds and no limits. No one could really say how many suffered, vanished, and were missed.
Then, finally, from the madness, those of us who survived emerged, blinking, beaten and bloody, into the sun that had finally reemerged, its warmth and brightness filling our lives once again. We shook hands with the neighbours we had beaten with our fists hours earlier. We sat in the streets, staring into the sky, watching the animals return, seeing plants sputter back to life, and forgetting what we had done.
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