When they moved to a bigger city, she came to know the streetlights. One next door, another two doors down, and more, marching down the city’s pathways, doing their job. She knew the history: the stories, from cave people using fire to keep wild animals away; to Prometheus the fire-bringer, punished for bringing fire; to Spider Woman gifting the fire of knowledge. But light without dark, she thought, is without relief, relentless, harsh, and unforgiving.
The back door let out onto a peaceful tiled patio. She planted trees around it, but still the streetlights proudly surpassed the stars. At night, when she couldn’t sleep, naked she would slip out quietly and search the sky for the moon. Some nights it shone so brightly there were shadows in the yard—to photograph with her old 35mm in the rare black-and-white film, to cajole into dance partners, to outline with stones, to loosen thought.
In her fifties she did not dance as much; instead, she watered the garden by moonlight and listened to the grateful insects sound their shower serenade. Hose in hand, she made a game of avoiding the spills of light from the houses next door.
In their bedroom she watched the bright rays from the neighbor’s tall, backyard security light seep around the shade and through the curtains of the bedroom window. Could they buy the neighbor a less intrusive bulb or a fixture that would point to the ground?
“I like it that way,” said the neighbor.
He liked it his way, she thought. Laughing, she told her husband about “booger lights.” That’s what they were called in her youth, special lights for people scared of bogies, spooks. The rural electric company encouraged these and paid for them; she remembered them as the first lights she encountered that never went out. Much later, these lights learned to darken themselves at dawn. The lightening of the sky and first heralding of the birds informed the sentinels of the streets it was now their bedtime. But there was always a rogue streetlight who stayed awake and cast an unneeded, unheeded splash of bright.
Was it the spread of electricity that triggered the decay of the dark? Or was it when therapists began asking patients to draw Shadows from their subconscious and expose these dark elements to the light? These monumental events were synchronous, after all, she reasoned: what happened in the inner world manifested in the outer world.
Streetlights and the neighbors’ unforgiving porch lights cast plenty of light in the bedroom, artificial light that played tag with her fitful sleep. Each night she resolved: Tomorrow I will buy black cloth and line the bedroom curtains. Each morning, she pulled the curtains open to greet the glory of sunlight and forgot her resolution. The same year she read 8 Weeks to Optimum Health she started an anti-LED campaign, taped cardboard scraps over the stove and microwave clocks, and hid the bedroom clock under a towel. In the darkened house, she felt her way down the windowless hall, fingers sliding along the wall. Sometimes she met faint shadows from doorways she’d forgotten to close, doorways to rooms with windows revealing the outside lights flooding the sky, where the big-bang-flames still strolled on course, if seen mostly by astronomers. She stopped herself from this endless train of thought, a hallmark of the never satisfied. The choice between no light or manufactured light was black or white, no room for the golds and grays.
Eventually, the cold light of LEDs became ubiquitous. Their latest cellphones, at hand in the bedroom for alarm and emergency, lit whenever they took a mind to it. She tried a sleep mask, a gift from an airline, but the pressure of the fabric and strings annoyed her almost as much as the lights. Finally, she found a vintage wind-up clock that would match their décor. Her husband noted the clock’s high price tag. He said she was never satisfied. Maybe he was right. The clock with character stayed in the flea market, and he helped her cover the uncontrollable phones with extra pillows each night. Until they found the right clock.
She installed foot-high, soft solar lamps along the sidewalk leading up to the house, to help prevent falls by her husband, herself, and their friends, who were also sixty-ish and older. She hoped these would not deeply disturb the animals that lived in or wandered through their yard. You can’t have good without bad, she mused—sun without rain, light without dark. Forcing the dark into lost corners, installing searchlights to forestall surprises—including, perhaps, a badger hellbent on hunt or a nightingale’s longing song—deprives Nature of her beauty sleep and shrinks her into a shadow of herself. Still, the risk of falls had become so great that she had to provide light for the walk from driveway to porch.
The original lights died after a season or two; to replace them she could only find sharper, brighter, bluer, solar-powered LED sidewalk lights. Irritated at their meaner light, one night she smashed the brightest of them. “Wonder who did that?” her husband said. The one who is never satisfied, she didn’t say. Her Shadow.
In retirement, they vacationed a few weeks with friends in Maine, near a lake and a walking park, a short drive to the beach or forest. Ideal. But there were well-lit courtyards on either side of their friends’ home, whose windows had no curtains, only flimsy shades. Could she buy drapes? “It’s such a great spot,” said her husband (who preferred vacationing in famed cities), “and free too, but you’re never satisfied.”
She had to agree.
In her seventies, arthritis prohibited sewing, but she discovered she could order beautiful, printed black-out curtains online, and the window-light was now under their control. Close those curtains and the utter dark was one step towards sleep, which grew more clever at hiding from her every year—while her husband sighed, rolled over, and went, smiling, to Dreamland. Hearing his even breath, spooning into his back, smelling his shoulders, she relaxed. But she was never entirely satisfied with that false darkness. Her husband, a city boy, had never lived without artificial lights; the decay of the dark was easier for him. Still, hadn’t he bought her the painters’ tape they always packed now, and stood on rickety chairs while she clutched his legs, using it to darken the lights of the hotel smoke alarms? That was love.
She practiced gratitude now, lying in bed, first remembering romance and their early years together, then reaching farther back, picturing her lovely childhood living with sunlight, starlight, and moonlight. Dawn breaking through her window early on summer mornings, caressing her cheeks like a tiny cat who wants to be fed. The school-day winter: traveling with the watery sun through the mist across the pastures, to the fork in the road where she waited in hat and mittens for the school bus. The sky brightening to burning, throwing solid shadows across the clay, turning it from light red to chestnut.
Her large bedroom windows faced west, and on the endless summer days of her youth, Mother tucked her in long before dark. The light faded and she faded with it into sleep. Winter evenings, Mother’s goodnight kiss, a click of the switch by the door, enveloping her in a secure, incomplete dark interrupted only by cycling stars, glowing planets, and the moon in its various phases, waxing, full, waning, dark—all beyond the curtains anytime she wished to have a look.
She never stopped yearning for a return to such a place with such a sky, but that never happened; she worked, lived, and created in cities. In those urban hotbeds of recognized trauma, she learned about internal shadows, ways to bring her own dark side into the light, face it, learn from it, respect it. Still, she knew she was most whole, most integrated, when she was outdoors.
There were vacations, but now, even her brother’s cabin in the mountains was surrounded by new homes, their spotlights on every corner of the eaves permanently piercing the dark. On the coast, moonlight might dance upon the ocean’s waters, but all the beaches with hotels were brightly lit. The moon turned its paling back and ran for lands less artificially illuminated. She wished it well on its search. She was no longer telling her husband the vacation lights bothered her, though. She tried to be satisfied. Grateful.
In their eighties, aging in place, change became a frequent subject of conversation. Once, when she and her husband were out driving, she pointed to The Car Lot, which had been famous for its bargains. Though it had been closed and empty for over a year, overhead lights still futilely beckoned car buyers and protected against thieves. Curious, they drove into the lot, and her husband asked a caretaker, “Who is paying for these lights?” They did not get a satisfying answer.
One year, the young mayor declared a Dark Sky Night. Many people turned out their lights, and every other streetlight was turned off. On that lovely night, she and her husband walked in the neighborhood, then drank wine on the patio, undeterred by the fact that their neighbor kept his booger light on—he grumbled that it would be a good night to be robbed. Later, the Dark Sky mayor resigned to run for Congress and lost. The new mayor did not mention Dark Sky Night, preferring to discuss how many electric car stations were actually needed—weren’t there too many?
Then one precious light flickered and died, the one who lit her world with his steady love. She wept until she thought her eyes would never accept light again. They did.
More turns of the earth saw her move to the town’s highest hillside. She looked down from her window in the nursing home, and like an old mountaineer who knew the stars, she, in her slip-sliding approach to ninety years, knew the brighter of the town’s lights. There’s the glow of the closed Car Lot. There is the patch of light of the new one. There is Wal-Mart. There is the hospital with its lighted lanes and entrances. Their names were not as pretty as the names of the constellations. Long ago, cresting into puberty, she had learned of Orion, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia; the science teacher held her class spellbound with their stories.
Old friend Sun warmed her face on the shared patio. Inside, windows were warm spots, daylight filtered by curtains, shades, or both. In the rooms and hallways, lamps augmented daylight. The home could not afford falls, and daylight was unpredictable. Bright overhead lights were not equipped with any softening mechanisms, and she longed for dimmers to free the dark from such blatant murder.
Candles were illegal, another hazard for the oldsters. But she missed them, so she featured them in a mind game when she was tired of reading, board games, and television. Seated in her favorite chair in the common room, she closed her eyes and chose an occasion for a special candle: a birthday’s lovemaking, hearing a special record for the first time, a party, visiting an historic church, saying significant goodbyes. If the room stayed quiet, she pictured a candle for each event, lit it, watched it, smelled it, remembered the people associated with an event until the sacred flame died—or until she was gently touched and reminded it was dinner time.
At night she imagined the spin and brilliance of the eternal, transmutational Milky Way—red roving Mars calling to cloudy cantankerous Venus—before a pill sent her to a dreamless sleep.
Soon she would return, permanently, to the peaceful dark, her last move.
And then, would she long for the light? She didn’t think so, but then, she was never satisfied.
Author's Comment
Light pollution includes light trespass, sky glow, glare and clutter. If it bothers you, too, learn more about its causes and ways you can easily intervene, from Dark Sky International.
A Dead Woman’s Memoir
Deborah Douglas Wilbrink recently retired from ghostwriting elders’ memoirs to write fiction. Her work has been published in Asymptote, Dead Mule, and the Bright Flash Literary Review. She received the Can Serrat Writer Residency in Spain to develop Free Tits and Other Stories from the Second Wave, a collection of short stories about applied feminism, forthcoming in 2026. Deborah divides her time between Asheville, NC, and Barcelona, where she volunteers original, live music, like “Debrina’s On Fire,” released this winter. For more, visit 
Jennifer Shneiderman is a writer and visual artist. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including Yale University’s The Perch, UCLA’s Windward, and Kent State University’s The Listening Eye. Her visual art has been featured in Rock Salt Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, Unleash Lit, God’s Cruel Joke, and L'Esprit Literary Review.