Nothing can be Red and Green

There was never absolute darkness where I stood; even in the dead night, my colors maintained their unwavering vigil, casting themselves into the quiet of the sleeping city. The streets- at the hour I favoured- lay emptied of their ceaseless rush, stretched out like tired veins drained of vitality. My light descended in thin, languid slants, a faint, detached illumination grazing the fissured edges of pavement around me. The houses loomed behind veiled trees, their windows concealed by heavy curtains, guarding the dimming light further behind. The glow ebbed fainter as the hours fell. As if the souls behind such glass panes were sinking  into some hushed oblivion, enshrouded in an obsidian quit, resigning themselves into an eternal, dreamless slumber.

The air too, had weight , thick and stagnant, infused in the distilled essence of earth below. As the days waned, I began to convince myself I could apprehend such a smell. The musk of damp soil mingled with something metallic- perhaps the decay of my iron frame. The few cars that traversed  these nights passed hesitantly, their wheels whispering across the asphalt; any louder and they might have been swallowed by this solemn hush.  My arm, rigid, immobile, quivered faintly in the nocturnal breeze, as though questioning whether light was necessary in this desolate emptiness. And yet it all felt tender, sweet, as if my flickering signals were meant only for the fallen ghosts, the restless wanderers who still yearn for a world that has receded irretrievably beyond grasp.

But with dawn, where my light wasn’t so bright, came the constriction of my wires, a metallic shudder coursing through, a tension bracing anticipation of the day’s restless tide. Noise rose, roared in waves, the grinding of wheels on asphalt, hurried shuffle of shoes on, muttering impatience of drivers, making the air stained with exhaust, with urgency. And the great beasts of the streets awoke, stretching sinewed limbs of metal and flesh, caught in the cruel eddy of perpetual motion. But there was rhythm, a patch of patterns etched clearer beneath the still, unforgiving  light of morning. I-perched above all mass, immutable and vigilant-  was the fulcrum to which this immense wheel of motion revolved.

The world moved, and stopped  then surged again, a choreography of obedience I grasped unthinkingly. My crimson glare arrested time; wheels groaned to a halt, feet hovered at edges of curbs. Humanity’s united eyes lifted towards the sky, with expectation and irritation. And when I flared green, spreading lush green across the intersection, the current roared forth, dormant engines awoke, bodies unfurled into motion, shoes struck the pavement with brisk focus, purpose. I caused these transitions, aloof, yes, but omnipresent, the cacophony of sound folded itself into harmony through the steady regulation of my color. 

At first, I never questioned their submission. I was the axis around which their feverish lives revolved. The mechanics to their haste, their safety and their moments of hesitation. The morning was an undying torment of  clamor, coalesced into a sentient being whose heart throbbed in time with my signals. The streets spread out like arteries coursing with purpose, and a cold satisfaction seeped through me as I orchestrated this theatre. I gripped the reins of order, and in the unwavering certainty of such a demanding role, I stood watchful, my colors blinking with the mute assurance of unassailable authority.

But with awareness came pride, and with pride, the slow searing intoxication of power. My gaze sharpened with such power, I began to discern the fragile lives beyond the glass and steel- I began to see the beings who yielded to my unfeeling decree, From my rigid perch, they solidified as subdued creatures, their wills tethered to the order I imposed. I saw their limbs too, pale-hands clenched on steering wheels, the veins strained taut with suppressed restraint. They had feet too, hovered just above pedals, trembling like coiled springs waiting for the signal to unfurl. Beings with eyes, glinting beneath the glare of windshields, flickering with resignation, irritation and the occasional bleak acknowledgment of their limitations. Their grumbles of discontent, their fleeting joys and sorrows- all so insignificant, a tremor beneath my command. Yet their trust in my exactitude kindles in me the first ember of something akin to the colors of feeling.

But knowledge far from one's apprehension is the heralds of the first fall, there was the sting of envy. They possessed limbs, instruments of fluid grace, a maddening and unattainable freedom. Their bodies curved, stretched, molded by their will, reshaped in spaces with a fluidity that mocked my form. I could command, I could signal, impose, but they could choose. That was power too. A power that  bloomed something wild and unruly, that defied symmetry. I caught those beings in their rebellion, fools darting through my scarlet glare. I consoled myself they were brittle anomalies, too fragile and imperfect to touch the elegance of order, a weakness that was destined to shatter them beneath their own folly.

Yet the embers of envy smoldered, unquenchable.Were such limbs mine, that supple power would not be squandered on such idle gestures. No, I would forge it into an instrument of unrelenting will. Twisting their disobedience into a brittle compliance, breaking every rebellion of chaos, for it to yield to flawless symmetry. No cracks, no hesitation. My tyranny would be crystalline in its purity, my dominion absolute, a cold and inevitable law under which every fault would crumble. Most of all, it would be perfect.

Limbs could be soft too-unbearably soft. I discovered this soon after, though it felt like a contradiction to everything that anchored me. Their softness, I found, was sharp in its irony, sharpest when souls intertwined, when the space between them dissolved into nothingness. I could compel the city’s will, summon its furious momentum or smother it into silence, and yet this- convergence of warmth- remained beyond me. If anything might have reached me in my time, it would have been this. But I stood too high, marooned in my mechanical austerity, forever barred from feeling it.

Below, a man knelt, a silhouette of surrender carved into the earth. And therein lay the cruellest sin, for such surrender was stoppage, the splintering of motion that should have surged endlessly forward. His coat, worn and weary, slumped around him, its folding, drooped heavily to the earth, falling with the solemnity of an ancient branch bent low beneath the weight of its years. His hands, broad and roughened by toil, extended forward, trembling with a fragile uncertainty. They opened awkwardly, their calloused palms, untouched by anything harsher than the blades of grass that grew and slumbered in far, far fields- fields I could never reach . These were the hands built to grasp firmly, yet they hung vulnerably, loosely, as though they might fracture if denied what they sought. Without the small figure before him, those hands would have closed around emptiness, quivering in the doubt.

The child rose toward him as if the earth had already let her go. As though space had never existed between them. Her feet lifted from the earth, her laughter unspooled into the air, light and uncontained. Her legs kicked free, untouched by care or thought. For a heartbeat, she hovered above him, above the world, in a sense above me. A being that was transcendent, untethered, something greater than motion or stillness.

And then he caught her.

Hands closed around her ribs with a gentleness devoid of force or command. She settled into them perfectly, her slight frame curving into the hollows of his palms as if she had always belonged. The hem of her dress brushed against his wrist, a gossamer whisper, light enough to be ruptured with the slightest pressure. She belonged within that arc shape of his arms more than she ever did to the ground beneath her feet.

It wasn’t power. No. The man carried no pride in his bent form. His back curved with the strain of holding her, breath drawn tight, his chest expanded as if the act of tenderness might crush him. He held her with lungs brimming yet gasping, as though love exacted more than he could give. His hands trembled still. But his trembling was strength, a strength untainted by dominance

And I, bound above, could only watch.

He stood at last, the child balanced precariously in his arms, her small weight shifting, almost slipping, but his hands steadied her with a gentleness I could never conjure. Her feet found the ground once more and together they drifted away, their forms unraveling into pure, fluid motion summoned by the flicker of my green light.

Yet the space they left behind remained . It gaped wide, hollow and unclosing, an absence gnawed at me, it clung like rust to the cold iron of my frame, seeping into the wiring where I thought my thoughts pulsed in pristine precision. Corruption  tangled itself there, slow and insidious, threading through circuits unacquainted with failure. Like venom, it spread, an unseen rot winding deeper than I could fathom.

I flashed green. I flashed red. The world obeyed-because it always did. wheels churned, feet shuffled. But with each flash of color, a wound reopened. I could see the silence that stretched and swelled like a chasm between the shepherd and flock. I saw how it grew. It settled into the light of day and forced itself into spaces between footfall and brakes. It was swollen, grotesque, bloated with everything I could not hold.

I could stop them, I could move them, but they passed me, passed through my light and my authority. Nothing lingered. Nothing stayed. And even if it had, I remained above such fleeting things. My steel was unfeeling, wires blind to touch, yet something- something nameless- had wedged itself within me. Twisting itself, cruel and definite, scraping against the emptiness that was my only inheritance.

For all this towering power, I was imprisoned by my own height, a sentry fixed in place, the world folded and packaged beneath me, forever close, close enough to be far beyond. Never able to kneel, to catch or be caught.

And in that silence, that absence that would not fade, the truth hardened, I felt something close to horror. A chill deeper than my frame, sharper than the circuits. This was no fleeting solitude. No shadow that would lift. 

No- this was loneliness cemented into permanence- vast, cold, and unrelenting

And there’s this feeling- a suffocating pressure at the closing. The kind that tightens as the night folds in upon itself. You feel it, feel it like the final latch of a door locking behind you. 

For something like me, this day should have been no different from the countless before it. It would be wrong if it tasted any more absent, wrong if the void stretched any deeper than it already did.

But tonight, that feeling grew sharper, harder, and the dead of night returned, cloaked in this silence. Something quivered too, beneath that noise, a vibration pounding softly through the quiet, coiled and patient.

Then he appeared. 

The man.

Alone.

The child was gone, and without her, he was hollowed out. His presence muted, dimmed. He walked slowly in deliberation, every step made against exhaustion. He halted beneath my glow, my red light poured over him, like a diluted wound, highlighting his silhouette in stark brittle lines. A figure wrought from darkness, edges worn with fatigue. His face was obscured, tethered to thoughts too soft to form words.

And in this night, the streets stretched out before us, veins of asphalt glistened faintly beneath my weary light. The quiet was here, but this quiet was tense. I felt its vibration, faint but insistent. It whispered ruin into the bones of the street, growing louder, deeper. It spread far down the road, where things thickened and the darkness became impenetrable. There, something crouched, heavy and inevitable, waiting just beyond the reach of my light.

Then the sound came. 

 A low growl, a guttural vibration dragged from the depths of the night. It crept forward, pulsing with menace. Silence fractured, splintering like glass, and everything trembled with the quake. It continued to grow louder and thicker until all other entities recoiled back, until the air was being torn apart.

And then the headlight appeared.

Two cold, hollow eyes cut through the void, fixing everything in their pitiless glare. They burned with empty purpose, devoid of hesitation or urgency. Behind them, the car followed- a black mass of steel hurtling forward with a velocity that scorned restraint. The engine screamed, a brutal, metallic howl of momentum. Black wings of speed unfurled behind it, darker than the starless sky. Its wheels spun relentlessly, each rotation a gnashing of teeth,  devouring the distance between us.

I Blazed red- blood-red, vivid, unmistakable. A command, a plea, desperate, but such wheels weren’t made to deaf to plea. And the man didn’t move. His shadow stretched long and thin beneath my light, a fragile specter a part of the moment. For a fleeting instant, time should have paused, hesitated on the brink of annihilation. But it didn’t. The car didn’t.

It struck.

Impact arrived as obliteration, not collision. The world erupted, torn apart by unrestrained violence. Metal crumpled, screamed, cleaving the night in two. Glass exploded into a whirlwind of jagged shards, scattering across the street like fallen stars. The roar of the engine vanished beneath the shockwave, a tide force of destruction engulfed everything. I fell, my frame twisted and broken, crashing to the ground in a cascade of sparks and splintered steel.

And from where I lay, level with the pavement, I saw.

The man was no longer a man- no longer anything that could be named. Torn to pieces, his body flung apart, scattered across the street by the sheer ferocity of the impact. A leg lay twisted grotesquely, the bone split,  stark white against the shredded flesh. The shoe remained perfectly intact, its laces still tied neatly.

An arm sprawled several feet away, hand, half closed, fingered curled, grasping. Tendons dangled like snapped cords, muscle pierced by jagged metal. Blood smeared the cold concrete, dark and slicker, a viscous sheen that oozed over the obsidian like steel,  pooling thickly through the cracks of earth like oil.

The torso remained most visible, ribs jutted out like broken bars of a cage, stark white against the charred flesh. The edges of skin peeled back, blackened tissue seared by heat. Glistening rivulets of blood, tracing paths through the wrecked, wrapped around the heat, its sticky sheen reflecting the flickering glimmers. Then the flames came, crawling over the wreckage with greedy, flickering tongues. They licked at the shattered bones, blackened flesh, circling the crash, twisting it into a blurred nightmare of light and shadow.

If I had eyes, they would have fused shut, scorched by the pitless glare of the inferno. If I had ears, they would have shriveled at the crackle flesh devoured by flame, the slow collapse of disintegrating bones and the  venomous hiss of blood transmuting to steam. If I had a voice, it would have shattered into a scream, a raw, feral thing, lost amidst the rasping sounds of annihilation.

And If I had legs, I would have dragged my broken frame across the blistered asphalt, scraping my metal against the embers, every inch carved from agony. Not to witness such devastation, but to be there- beside him. To share his ruin and offer whatever solace there could be for such a broken thing. 

And If I had hands, they would have trembled as I placed them on his back, curving gently over his broken ribs. Not to shield him from the flames voracious hunger, but to cradle his body, to lend a fleeting warmth to flesh gone impossibly cold.

Because a coldness like that, a loneliness so final, should not  exist. Not in this dark, this pitiless, unloving night, this savage, starless void, where no hint of love or pity lingers.

But I had nothing. No eyes to witness, no ears to recoil, no legs to move, no hands to console. Only the burden of knowing. 

I lay there, a ruined and inert thing. As the flames consumed the living and the dead, the night stretched, a vast implacable silence drowning all final cries of blood and screams. Through it all, my light flicked- red, green and red again…

I had been cast down, dragged into their fragile world, and for a moment, I felt the warmth of their chaos, the sweet ache of their smallness. And yet, I remained cold, colder than I had ever been, the fall had not melted me; it had left me burning with a frost seared deeper than flame, harder than iron.

Most of all, I mourned the noise-  the  endless surge of humanity streaming through the streets, the unyielding procession of heavy machinery, vast and purposeful, their movements  far greater than my design. I ached for the brief interludes, when the clamor stilled- when the world paused, held captive under the stillness of a grander luminarary - a force of radiance emanated from heavens far, far above my own illumination.