Blackout on the Glass Tower
The city lights dimmed with a sigh, and in that moment the Glass Tower stopped pretending to be a beacon. On the cue of a single fuse, the entire block surrendered to darkness, save for the thin red glow of exit signs and the stubborn flicker of emergency LEDs that stuttered like a heartbeat. From the outside, the tower looked pristine—a jewel stitched into the night—but inside, the glass remembered every scream, every whispered fear pressed against its surface, and began to echo them back in a language the modern mind pretends not to hear.
I am the night shift supervisor, the one who checks the vents and the stairwells when the world falls silent. The building’s hollow hush pressed on my ears, a velvet weight that turned footsteps into museums of sound. The elevators lurched to a halt between floors, doors pried open just enough to reveal blackness like a mouth waiting to swallow your words. In the hallways, the glass panels reflected an empty cityscape that didn’t quite align with the rooms behind them, as if the tower housed a parallel version of itself—one with darker corners and strings attached to every memory I ever buried in my childhood attic.
As I moved, the silence grew teeth. The air smelled of rain and copper, and the distant rain outside came with a chorus of tapping—faucets, windows, the soft tremor of a radiator that believed itself still alive. In the reflection of the glass, a figure drifted where a tenant’s desk chair should have rested, a silhouette that wasn’t mine and yet wore my face like a mask. The figure watched me with patient, impossible eyes, and every time I turned to speak, the mouth in the reflection curled into a tiny, clinical smile that belonged to someone who knew my secrets better than I did.
“The glass does not show you the room you’re in; it shows the room you have forgotten how to leave.”
When the lights failed, the tower’s inside-outness became clear. I moved from floor to floor and found, in every corridor, reminders of what we dare not admit: the people who vanished into the night after a minor fault, the whispers that gathered on the stairwell like dry leaves, the toys and trinkets left behind by tenants who no longer existed in the daylight. A soft wind threaded through the vents, carrying a chorus of voices that spoke in lullabies and threats, promising that the city would forget our names but not the fear we carried into the glass.
- The elevator stalls between floors, then slides a whisper of a sound up through the cables.
- Mirror-like panels reflect faces that aren’t there, or aren’t yet fully present.
- Footsteps that follow you but don’t belong to any one person, growing closer when you doubt your own memory.
- A hum that sounds like a memory begging to be finished, and a clock that refuses to keep time.
I reached the stairwell roof, where the city’s dark silhouette lay beneath a broken sky. The wind there felt colder, as if the night itself had learned my name and decided to press closer. I stepped onto the rooftop, and for a heartbeat the world tilted, revealing the truth: the Glass Tower is not merely a structure of steel and skin, but a vessel that stores the fear of everyone who ever pressed their face to its windows. The blackout didn’t end; it settled into a new rhythm, and I learned to listen to its patient, terrible heartbeat—and to walk toward whatever light might still exist, one cautious step at a time.