THE WALRUS

Tumblr Prompt: It’s 3AM. An official phone alert wakes you up. It says “DO NOT LOOK AT THE WALRUS”. You have hundreds of notifications. Hundreds of random numbers are sending “It’s a beautiful walrus. Look.”

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I blink myself awake not sure I actually heard anything. No one ever texts me at 3AM, not since college anyway. Someone had better be dead, I think to myself, instantly regretting it. What if someone really is dead? I knock an empty water bottle off the nightstand before finding my phone. I keep it face down so the light doesn’t mess with my sleep. 

“What the fuck is this?” I am the kind of person who disabled the Amber Alert, Presidential Alert and Inclement Weather alerts on my phone because you know, I just don’t really care. 

“DO NOT LOOK AT THE WALRUS” scrolls repeatedly across the top of my screen. I think maybe some hacker with a goofy name is going to be internet famous come morning. I set the phone back down and roll back over. I have to be up for work in less than four hours. I hate knowing how long I have to sleep. I guess I am grumpy at night. 

That is when the notifications start: Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, pinnnnnnggggggg. Too many hits for the little electronic bell to keep up. I roll back and flip my phone over. 10, 20, 50, 100… all new messages, all random numbers with the same message: “it’s a beautiful walrus. Look.”

The last of my desire to go back to sleep fell away. I put the phone down as the notifications creeped towards the thousands, seeming to grow exponentially every second. I reached across the bed to wake up my girlfriend Lily and see if both of our phones had become possessed. Where she was usually sprawled was empty, the blanket still tangled and warm. 

“Babe?” I called out. The apartment was dead silent. No TV, no music, no water running. Not even the hum of the refrigerator or the ambient drone of the heat. Everything was quiet, everything was still. Even my phone gave up on pinging, the notification light just stayed on and my unread messages tab read as “XXX”. Too many too fast to display, I assume. 

I slipped on my robe and shoved my malfunctioning phone into my pocket. I walked out of the bedroom and into the large living room. 

“Lil?” I called out again, figuring Lily had gone to watch TV and fallen asleep on the couch. She was nowhere to be seen. The bathroom door was open, it was dark in the kitchen. I turned towards the front door when I saw it. There was something wrong with the world outside the two large windows on either side of the door. The sky was not a 3AM sky. It was… wrong. 

The sky was luminescent, a million colors bleeding back and forth, dotting and exploding like a TV between channels, the background radiation of the universe in full blooming radiance. It made me dizzy, my skin tingled like all my body hair had stood up and been burned off in one nanosecond. I was electric, my stomach leapt and twisted, my heart felt like it was in my throat. A year of anxiety all experienced in the span of a breath in and out. I felt cold sweat on my scalp and tasted bile and salt on my tongue. 

“It really is beautiful. Look.” Lily’s quiet voice made me jump and stub my foot on the couch leg. She was standing there in the curtains, her head tossed back and neck held tight at a desperate angle. She was barefoot in an oversized teeshirt. The curtain billowed out around her but the wind made no sound. 

“Hun I think something weird is going on…” I approached and reached out to Lily. Before I could touch her arm she spun and screamed in my face. 

“IT REALLY IS BEAUTIFUL, LOOK!” Her eyes were black and her mouth was distended. White spittle flew and when she grabbed my arm I felt like my shoulder was going to be torn from the socket. Lily was tiny, she shouldn’t be that strong. 

“LOOK!” she screamed again, drowning my protests and making my ears ring. 

I shut my eyes just as my face made contact with the glass pane of the window. I felt glass crack against my cheek. I am pretty sure I felt my teeth cracking too. 

“LOOK LOOK LOOK!!!” Lily screamed, louder and louder. Her fingernails dug into the skin around my collar. She shook me like a cat with a dying mouse. 

I looked. 

It was beautiful.

It was really beautiful. 

You should look.

LOOK.