The lights are flickering in this house. It didn’t use to be like this. They go off, all the time, everywhere: the big lamps in the living room, the small lights in the bathroom, even the very tiny one by my bedside.
I noticed it, first, on the big light on my room's ceiling. When I was a kid I would stare into it until I felt I was going blind - at the shadows in there, between the lightbulb and the lamp: Flies. Little winged dots. It didn’t use to be like this. They were alive, once, flying around my room, staring into the lamp just like I did. But maybe too close. Maybe too long. Maybe, sometimes, they would stop moving. I looked away whenever that happened. I stared into my bedsheets and blinked the light away.
Somebody cleaned the lamp while I wasn't here. It didn’t use to be like this. When the lights flicker now, it’s like the whole world is blinking. “Something wrong with the power provider,” my mother says. “A couple weeks, should be fixed in a couple weeks.”
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