The Black Skies of Danny Brackett

When darkness threatens to take Danny, he tries to hide from what he knows is inevitable.

When the skies finally turned black, Danny Brackett stopped leaving his house. He was in his late teens, a boy forced into being a man. Before he was a young man inserted into the body of a lanky eighteen-year-old, Danny Brackett was your normal kid.

Then tragedy began to strike Danny like he was a firefly caught in the string of a lighting bolt. First his mother was eaten away by an inoperable cancer that started in her eye and moved down until her heart and lungs were consumed, leaving her a gasping, heartless, and blind woman.

At least that’s how Danny remembers his mother. Always knocking things over and wheezing his name to come help her. The day she died the skies began to dim.

Thinking about his mother makes Danny’s skin worm. That slow crawling fear that he did something wrong out of fear and there’s no changing it. But Danny doesn’t see it as that. He sees it as a symptom of the black sky crowding above.

After his mother died, his father opted to send him to live with distant relations who had a farm and were known for being stricter with the kids than their animals. Once on the vast acreage, Danny learned the run of the mill and had his rooster plucked more times than he’d like.

Despite the cruelty of his relatives, Danny loved the farm for its wide-open skies that made things seem too big to die. Until the killing started.

In a way, Danny knows that the killing didn’t just start one day, that it had been going on since he arrived at the farm and long before. The killing of animals, of childhood joy, of love, and of the sky.

Their slaughterhouse and rendering factory turned the air dark and the water red, so Danny ran away back home and to the father who didn’t want him, bringing a mess of scars on his fourteen-year-old body. Though his father treated him like an abandoned dog, leaving out scraps of food for him to eat and letting him set up a tiny room in the basement, Danny was happy.

Beneath the floorboards of the house, he couldn’t see the black skies and for a time, things were again bearable. While Danny cowered in the basement pretending that every second was a blue sky outside, something inside him was brewing a storm.

On Danny’s eighteenth birthday, his father called him upstairs and explained to Danny that he was no longer welcome in his home. His father indicated with more words than was necessary that there was a darkness in Danny that he always hated and fear.

Now that Danny was eighteen, there was no legal or moral obligation for him to continue allowing the boy to fester in his basement. Out is what Danny’s father wanted him. Gone in the storm and lost to the darkness.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the blackness crowding Danny’s vision wanted. Out, out into the world to choke it dry and bury it beneath a mound of obsidian ash created from the charred remains of what could have been a different Danny Brackett.

A Danny Brackett who accepted the death and deterioration of his mother and saw the world for what it was and not what it appeared in his head. But that Danny Brackett was long ago set aflame by delusions and cruelty. The Danny that stood before his father on his eighteenth birthday was a different man.

In the slow seconds that it took Danny to completely and certainty annihilate his father, he was a monstrous man made of screams, rage, and flailing arms that reached for anything and everything that he could bring down against his father’s face, turning the aged black man into a faceless horror.

Outside, Danny could see that the blackness had taken over the skies totally. A shadow hung over Danny, his father, and the house. Slowly, Danny crept back into the basement with his eyes on his father’s motionless body, watching the holes in the floor he had made swallow up the blood that pumped and poured from his father.

The further he retreated down the stairs the less he could see of the tiny massacre. He kept going until all he could see of his father was his socked feet. Then his father was gone from his vision and only remained in Danny’s mind and on his clothes and under his nails and in his hair and some on his teeth.

In the basement, Danny feels like it is all in his mind.

That his family and experiences are only moving caricatures of a madness unhinged. There in the basement things are manageable, small, nothing for him to worry about.

Instead, what he fears is the day when they will come, retrieve him from the cellar of his sanity, and drag him out where he will be swallowed by the darkness and finally become a part of the black skies.

Aigner Loren Wilson is a queer Black SFWA, HWA, and Codex writer. She was listed on the honors list for the Otherwise Fellowship award for 2019. Her work has appeared in Tor Nightfire, Rue Morgue, Arsenika, and more. She offers a writing craft newsletter to people who want to become better writers and publish quality pieces.