—al-Qazwini, Wonders of Creation
Casualties:
Nine people, ten water buffaloes, fifteen lambs and goats, and a large indeterminate number of chickens. Rabbits were not among the casualties, for reasons that no one bothered to explain. Among inanimate objects, seven houses had fire damage, two of which were entirely consumed by the flames. Three grocery storefronts were destroyed, the facades of eight dried-mud houses were demolished, and all the barn fencing had collapsed. After midnight, the manure piles and haystacks were scattered like dust in the sky over the village, and they didn’t settle down until dawn, when they slowly and gradually descended, to blanket houses and people overcome by exhaustion and terrified by the catastrophic events. They wept dry tears, without wailing over the victims, whom they started preparing for burial that morning: two men (one aged thirty and the other approaching eighty), two middle-aged women (one of them nine months pregnant), and five children, whose ages ranged between six months and eleven years.
Lights:
The neon lights began their relentless takeover of the village’s night sky twenty years ago, ever since the broadcasting signal-boosting station began emitting its radio waves out of the small newly constructed building surrounded by walls along the main road in front of the village. The workers who had taken jobs at the station were local villagers. They had been impoverished farm laborers who neither owned nor rented the land they tilled. Those who owned or rented land hired the villagers to work for them during the harvest season. These station employees passed on word to the rest of the village about what they had discovered after they had worked out the secret of the station from the engineers and technicians there. They understood that the station’s antennas were sending out strong waves that carried on their backs the transmission waves that had grown weak after coming all the way from the radio building in the distant capital. They called those signal-boosting waves “donkeys” because of their strength, their steadfastness, and their endurance as they supported the exhausted broadcasting waves and carried them all the way to the coast. As these “donkey” waves launched into the air currents that crossed the village sky, they gave off enough electricity into the atmosphere to light burned-out neon lamps, which had nothing left in them except a little mercury gas—not enough for the electricity in the wires, the current converters, or the usual starter coils to make the bulb glow.
The Relentless Advance of Lights:
Over the course of twenty years, the neon lights accumulated. It cost nothing for the villagers to light their broken lamps. They didn’t need electrical connections or any rigging other than just hanging them up on walls, near rooftops, over fences, and between tree branches. They didn’t need cords to string them up, just whatever was handy—fiber ropes, shreds of tattered clothing, or even linen threads and ivy vines.
An Excess of Incandescence:
Within a year, give or take a little, the village lights had begun to glow brighter at night; until the village became one of the most—if not the most—brightly lit spots on earth. Its nights had become days illuminated by several suns. The widespread use of energy-saving “DayLight” lamps in the country’s cities began to put neon lights—even when they were still at full capacity—into early retirement. Working neon lights grew numerous in the village, at almost no cost. They didn’t need to be hung up for the electricity in the air of the village to connect to their cathodes and light up their abundant gas. Their mere presence, hung up anywhere with both sides exposed, guaranteed they would glow brightly, on the ground, in the streets and alleys, over the fences and rooftops, in the animal pens, inside the chicken coops, over the canal bridges, and in all the fields.
The Change Wasn’t Unexpected:
Things went on like that for two decades, even if its growth was gradual and its features expanded over time. The village’s harvests, flooded by sunlight during the day and by neon lights at night, grew faster, larger, taller, and more abundant, although produce lost its familiar flavor. Cows began eating night and day without stopping, ending up closer to elephants in size, and they provided copious amounts of thin milk. However, their offspring became extremely weak: most of their calves perished in the first few days after birth. As for the people, their bodies grew obese, and they were inclined to be flabby and sluggish when they moved. Their sleep patterns became a series of short naps over the course of the day. During the brightly lit nights they no longer retired to their bedrooms in the evening to sink into sleep until early morning, the way they used to. Instead, they began to stretch out on stone benches, on rooftops, and beneath trees, to sleep in snatches at different times, only to wake up hungry and yawning, so they could eat and work a little. Then they would go back and stretch out again when their eyelids grew heavy.
The Night of the Storm:
It was said that the strength of the current in the station’s converters had a sudden spike. It was also said that that’s not what happened, but rumor had it that the neon lights that blanketed the village and the surrounding fields grew unusually bright, such that owls suddenly dozed off on sycamore branches and fences, and fell crashing down hard to earth. Bats returned to the roofs and eaves of ruined buildings, and clung there like suction-cup darts stuck to their targets. Bees began to buzz more, and birds, whose flying was disturbed, began to chirp louder. An unfamiliar clamor arose in the henhouses and pigeon coops, and the corrals grew noisy.
At Thirty Minutes Past Midnight:
Enormous frustrated poundings caused the doors of the corrals to fly off and tore apart their mud walls. The village’s water buffalo—all of them—burst free through the collapsed doors and the holes in the walls, as though a demon had summoned them all in a single moment. They were transformed into a stampeding herd, rushing blindly and madly into Farm Access Road, which ran through the entire length of the village. When the herd, rushing headlong, reached the end of the long road, it found itself in front of the old wooden bridge over the drainage canal, which was quickly destroyed under the weight of the animals and the heavy stomping of their hooves.
Following the Collapse of the Bridge:
Several water buffalo fell into the waters of the canal, and the agitated herd was at a loss, as the shock of unexpectedly coming to a stop began to make its way through the crowded body of buffalo, which was now colliding with itself. The shock combed through the herd from beginning to end, as muzzles and horns began to turn around, get tangled up and butt against each other. The great herd broke up into small confused groups that ran off in every direction. Wherever a light flashed here or there, the frenzied water buffalo turned their heads in that direction, towards any place where neon lights were hung or could be found. And when it was difficult for them to get to a lamp in an enclosed space, they proceeded to ram themselves against walls or doors or fences. In fact, they began poking their way into alleys and bursting into homes, searching for that glowing white light in order to extinguish it with their horns, their hooves, their snouts, and their rumps. They struck at emanations of that white light with all the fury their massive bodies possessed. The lights began to dim while fires burned, dust flew up, people screamed, and chickens and livestock tried to flee. But the trampling continued. When it became clear that they were aiming for those white lights, people hurried to smash all the lights their hands and legs could reach, until the village had gone completely dark, and the herds began making their way toward the only white lights left, the ones flickering far off in the wide expanse of the fields.
