This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Saturdead on 2026-05-15 23:34:56+00:00.

---

Back when I was in high school, we had to move on short notice. It was just me and my mom, and she was struggling to keep a job down. After getting tagged with a DWI, we ended up moving in with my aunt in the projects. It was the only way to make ends meet.

It was by far my lowest point. I slept on the couch in the living room while my mom took the bedroom. My aunt spent most of her time at her boyfriend’s place anyway, so she was rarely around. It was rough, to say the least. Everything can be rough at that age, but changing schools and getting thrown down a couple rungs on the class ladder was a bad combo.

I was a pretty normal kid. I played a lot of basketball, but I had no hopes of going pro. I had no idea what I was going to do. College was a pipe dream, so it was mostly about passing my classes and hoping for a miracle. Or a job. A job works too.

The area was pretty bad. One corner shop with welded windows and half a dozen hand-written signs stapled to the front door. No carts or baskets. A wall of pictures by the entrance showing who’s barred from entry. One of them had a little blue cross sign painted on, with a faded “R.I.P” beneath.

There was this sandwich place that must’ve been there since the 70’s. The place was tiny, with a lowercase ‘t’. I’ve seen refrigerator boxes that’s bigger. Basically a door where you can hear someone talking on the phone, with a sign that says “Yes goddamnit, we’re open”. Only two items on the menu; meat or no meat. I got nothing bad to say about that place though. Mr. Barker’s sandwiches are, to this day, the best damn street food I’ve ever had. I’ve tried recreating his pickled garlic salsa for years, but I can’t get the zest right.

Then there was the high school. There were metal detectors, and one of our teachers openly smoked in the classroom. The less I say about that place the better.

All that aside, it wasn’t like you couldn’t live there. I mean, yeah, it wasn’t pretty. You can sort of feel the eyes on your neck when you walk down the wrong street, but once you learn what street you’re not supposed to walk down, you’re gonna be okay. It’s not the kind of place where someone gets shot every day. I mean, it happens, but it’s not as random and sudden as people from the city think. You know who’s gonna be trouble by the look of them.

There’d been a couple of ideas on how to revitalize the area. There was an office at the far end that they tried to make into a sort of mini hotel. The kind of cheap place second-grade tourists stay at when they want the ‘authentic experience’. The place lasted for a couple of years but closed by the time we moved in down the street. There were still signs up when we got there, so it wouldn’t surprise me if some folks got tricked into thinking it was still open.

I wouldn’t say I had any friends, really. Not at first. I had some guys that I knew, and that I knew wouldn’t mess with me without a good reason. There was Kieran, for example. Pretty stand-up guy, we made a good team on the court. There was Holland, tallest guy in class. Nice, but a bit slow, and his hand-eye coordination was shot to shit. Guy could barely spell his name, but without him we couldn’t play three-on-three. There were a couple of others too, but most of them blended into the background.

When I’d lived there for about three months, there was a new push for revitalization. They put up new streetlights. Or at least, that’s what we thought.

First time I saw them was on a Thursday night. People were out and about. Someone was playing music, and I could hear someone yelling and whooping, but I couldn’t make out which apartment it came from. I had homework to do, and I wasn’t feeling sociable. My mom and aunt were out, leaving me to watch TV and procrastinating over equations.

I remember looking out the living room window, only to see a streetlight. At first I didn’t think about it, until I realized I’d never seen one there before. That’d been a problem for my mom when we first got there; she didn’t feel safe without them. At some point, the city must’ve fixed them. It was right there, bright as ever.

I watched a guy come wandering down the street and stopping underneath that light, looking up at it. He raised his hand to shield his eyes. He seemed to be a bit out of it, so maybe he just didn’t register what the hell he was looking at.

Then, the streetlight went out, just minutes after first spotting it. I blinked, adjusting my eyes.

There was no man there anymore. He was gone.

Over the next few days, I’d see the occasional streetlight here and there. Rarely the same one, and rarely for a long time. It’s as if they just came on momentarily, and only a few at a time. It felt appropriate, in a way. Of course the city would mess up trying something new. No good deed goes unpunished.

People around school were talking about it too. It was a known fact that the only streetlights that actually worked were the ones near the school, so to see any others was noteworthy. Not just because it was something new, but because it seemed inconsistent. They weren’t the only thing that’d happened around the neighborhood lately. For example, there was a full wall where they’d cleaned up the graffiti. They’d put in new windows in a couple of buildings. They’d moved one of the broken-down cars in the lot behind the gym.

Little things, but enough to show that something was going on. Kieran didn’t like it.

“It’s bad news,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know how, but it’s all bad news. It’s gotta be.”

Later that week, I was out with the guys. They were dropping by a house party and wanted me to come along to meet some new people. It was mostly Holland pulling the strings on that one, he was invited pretty much everywhere. We spent almost a full hour getting there, just because he got stopped by so many people he knew on the way. It was ten minutes away at a light jog.

It was a pretty chill party. I ended up with a lukewarm beer, sitting in a cheap white plastic deck chair, texting. Holland was inside, trying to figure out just how many people he knew there. Kieran sat in the deck chair next to me, but he’d already finished his beer. We were talking about school when a streetlight came on, just a bit down the street.

There was something else in the air. Something like static. My phone started charging, and I went from two bars of coverage to five. I could feel the screen going hot.

“You seeing this?” I asked, showing him my phone.

“Told you,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Some mind cancer bullshit.”

Holland came rumbling out of the house with what looked like a quarter bottle of whiskey. Two guys were right behind him, one of them insisting he could take him in a fight. A lot of people wanted to fight Holland, just because he was the biggest. Holland waved them off and walked up to us. Kieran pointed down the street, to the light. Holland looked for a while, then took a step back.

“Shit, they got it working?”

“I dunno,” Kieran huffed. “Don’t like it.”

”Gotta be brand new.”

Before I could say anything, he walked off to check it out.

Kieran and I got out of our chairs and followed him. A little group from the party tagged along. The closer we got the warmer my phone went, like we were walking up on a power source. I stopped a couple of steps away while Holland stepped right into the sharp cone of light. It felt less like a streetlight and more like a spotlight. Center stage. He looked straight up, like he was staring at the sun.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “It ain’t new. There’s stickers and shit.”

“They probably just fixed the bulb,” Kieran added.

“Nah, there was nothing here. You mean they put in a busted and tagged light from some other shithole? Come on, man.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Kieran shrugged.

Holland tapped the streetlight a couple of times, shaking his head. The light went out. We went from burning bright to murky street corner in the blink of an instant.

And when we looked a little closer, Holland was gone.

At first we were just confused. Not just me and Kieran, but a whole bunch of people. We looked around like he took off running. I called him, but I couldn’t connect the call. Kieran snapped him but got nothing. Here one moment, gone the next.

While the others went looking for him, and calling out to him, I took a closer look at the streetlight. I noticed something. There was no bulb, and the glass was broken. A moment ago, it’d been whole. But we hadn’t heard any glass break, and there were no shards on the pavement. That, and there were more stickers on the sides. Different stickers. It’s like I was looking at a completely different streetlight.

We walked around, calling out to Holland. Kieran elbowed me, showing me his phone.

“We walk this way, I get more bars,” he said. “Bet there’s another light.”

“Think he went there?”

Kieran didn’t answer. He just shook his head and looked down.

We walked around for a couple of hours, trying to find Holland. He wasn’t answering anything, and we couldn’t get a hold of him. Some folks ended up calling his uncle, who he lived with, but he wasn’t home either. Holland was gone. Out, like a light.

Just like Kieran predicted, we found another streetlight by the corner shop. It was only on for a couple of seconds, but in that time I saw a stray cat walk through. It didn’t come out the other side. As the streetlight went out, I made the same observation as before; it looked completel...

---

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1tecwuu/he_gone_with_the_light/