The Hour of Light

In the whole sunny neighborhood, there was only one neighbor that could be talked to. That *I* could talk to, because the others dismissed him like a small gossip town always dismisses people whose thoughts they can't follow. Before we both withdrew into our houses, he told me that our windows are positioned perfectly to watch the Hour of Light today.

The back windows would have overlooked the ocean if there hadn't been other houses in front and our own garden walls blocking the view. My family had closed us in from the others, who were also closed in. The garden was in shades, the vines had tangled into a cover where you forgot that it was summer outside and people who read their newspapers inside their own covers.

The windows, however, looked out. It should have been evening, but there was that light outside. The kind of light which makes no shadows and shows the world around you as cardboard panels. I liked it.

My forehead pressed silently onto the glass, I waited.

There was no sound as the row of houses before my eyes were replaced by water.

I tried to take in the whole horizon that had opened. The water was lit blue. There was a coral reef not far away and some soaked people on it. They looked confused. Didn't they know about the Hour of Light?

I looked at our garden and marked that the walls and the vines were gone, replaced by the light and the water. This was right.

And next I was underwater. Deeply underwater. It looked artificial, because it didn't have plants or fish. It was simply a blue translucent liquid pierced by rays from above. I was hanging in the middle between the sandy ocean floor and the lightened ocean ceiling, equally far away.

I felt scared.

But only a moment, and then I swam towards the light and lay on the corals.

I looked back and saw that our row of houses was gone and the walls of the next row were already disappearing. Some of the people looked frightened. I caught my neighbour's eye and waved. He was perched a bit farther on the coral, reading the newspaper.

The houses vanished, people surfacing everywhere, their looks pitiful. There were corals for them too.

I could sympathise with the ones who still feared the Hour of Light, our world was after all flattening under an infinite liquid plane. But I knew that the neighbour was the only one who could understand. Like I did.

When the hour passed and our houses appeared, my mother, still slightly shaking, sent me into the garden to play in the shade of the walls. I didn't try to say anything to her. Only my neighbor and I talked about the Hour of Light.