Bobby Severn's Flashlight

What can light do?

Photo by Klim Sergeev on Unsplash

Bobby Severn of Chicago, Illinois, was forty-two going on twelve. 

His wife, Katy, said so. His daughter, Prim, eleven, said so, as did Bobby’s son, Anthony, who was thirteen. 

Bobby didn’t disagree. He liked feeling twelve. There was nothing wrong with acting twelve because everything was perfect about that age. No taxes to pay, car to maintain, boss who demands underlings shine their ego, worries about cholesterol or expanding waistlines, arguing over the family budget, or waiting on hold with companies you didn’t want to talk to in the first place.  

At twelve, there were few things one had to do other than homework, which wasn’t so bad. There was also unlimited peanut butter and jelly and trick-or-treating. 

Twelve was Bobby’s Shangri-La. 

Twelve protected Bobby from the tedium of data analysis at the health insurance company where he worked. Twelve was his shield against adultdom’s woes. 

Although he would have liked to, for his family’s sake, Bobby did not reincarnate his twelve-year-old life with Lego cities in the living room, a dining room table covered with robot kits, a Lionel train circling their bed, a naval battle simulation running full-time in the bathtub, and a Matchbox car traffic jam in the hallway. The Severn’s home’s interior was indistinguishable from any other house in Chicago. Except for one thing.

“Where’s daddy?” Prim asked, after chasing their cat, Claus, around the first and second floors. Claus was now hiding, but Prim wanted to play more. A game enthralled Anthony on his phone, and Katy was cleaning the kitchen, which left only her father to play with. If she could find him.

“Your father is reading,” Katy said. 

“Again?”

“He likes to read. Reading is good for you, too. You and Anthony should read more instead of playing video games.”

Prim rolled her eyes. “They’re not video games, Mom. Sheesh. That’s from your era, the eighties or something. These are hard games with levels and badges.” She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “But where is he?”

Katy sighed. “You know where he is.”

“He’s under the blanket in bed in your room with a flashlight.”

“Yes. It gives your father great pleasure to read that way.”

“He acts my age.”

“Sometimes. But he is who he is, and one day you’ll know that doing what you like to do without worrying about what other people think is a great ability. Not many adults are free-spirited like your dad.”

“It’s weird.”

“You can play your video game if you want.” Katy shooed Prim away.

“They’re not video games,” Prim said as she stomped out of the kitchen. 

Twenty minutes later, after Katy had finished straightening the kitchen, she returned to the bedroom. She stood for a few moments, listening to the crisp snap of turning pages. With every page turn, the beam under the blanket wobbled a little.

Katy lifted the blanket, peered inside Bobby’s pretend tent, and asked, “How much longer are you going to read?”

When Bobby shifted toward Katy, his flashlight shone in her eyes. 

“Ouch!” Katy yelped.

“Sorry!” Bobby clicked off the chrome, ribbed Rayovac flashlight—the same flashlight he’d had as a kid: A thick, metal two D-cell flashlight with a sliding switch and button that, when pressed, turned on the light for a split second. With the button, you could send an SOS, or use it for secret signaling, which Bobby often did to chat with Manuel, who lived in the house across the street when he was in middle school. They had one code for wanting to borrow a comic book and a special code for “parent coming, gotta pretend I’m asleep!”

Bobby’s flashlight wasn’t the actual one he had as a kid. That light disappeared his first year at college when his parents renovated their house. He bought his current Rayovac on eBay, but it was the same make and model as the original. Like he did when he was actually twelve, Bobby powered the flashlight’s vintage filament bulb with old, carbon-zinc batteries. 

“Sorry, sorry.”

“It’s okay, babe. Try not to do that again.”

“Can I read for a while longer?”

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know. Another chapter?”

“Another chapter as in finish the book?”

“Maybe.”

“You can read for as long as you like.” Katy slid out from under the blanket, opened her night table drawer, put on a velvet anti-light sleep mask, and felt her way back under the quilt on her side. “Light won’t bother me.”

“I knew there was a reason I married you,” Bobby said.

“I knew there was a reason I haven’t divorced you,” Katy replied. 

When Katy's alarm sounded at 7 a.m., she found Bobby asleep in his pajamas, tented under his blanket, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation snuggled under his arm, and his flashlight still on. It struck Katy that the flashlight was brighter now, even with the morning light muscling its way into their bedroom. 

She pulled the blanket off Bobby and kissed his cheek. “Morning. I think you fell asleep reading.”

“Yes.” Bobby rubbed his eyes.

“Good book?”

“I’ve read it before.”

“I know. You love to reread your childhood books. But I have a question, husband-of-mine: How come your flashlight’s so bright? It’s brighter in daylight than it was in the dark last night.”

Bobby nodded. “Isn’t it? I thought so, too. When I got the bookmark from my night table, I found a thin, round circuit board made of what looked like gold with platinum wiring, and it was a perfect fit for the top of the battery. I put it inside my flashlight to see what it did. When I turned it on again, the flashlight was brighter.”

“And?”

“And I have no recollection of having bought that circuit. In fact, I’m sure I did not.”

“It must be an accessory you had misplaced until now that came with the flashlight.”

“Not for a nineteen-seventies flashlight. There were no such things as flashlight add-ons back then.”

“Maybe it was something you bought and forgot about.”

“That’s what I first thought, too, but this is the second night in a row that I’ve found a battery-sized circuit board. The one I put in the night before last made the flashlight slightly brighter, and the one I inserted last night made it significantly brighter. That’s why it hurt your eyes.”

“Maybe you drunk-ordered them from Amazon.” 

“No.”

“What about that rare Lego fighter jet you claimed not to have remembered buying?”

Bobby shrugged. “And another odd thing that doesn’t make sense: This flashlight uses an old incandescent bulb, which is incapable of putting out any significant light no matter how much power you apply. The bulb should have burnt out in a second at that brightness, like a popping flashbulb. But the lamp now shines brighter than a modern LED flashlight.”

“It’s certainly a mystery.”

The next night, Katy slipped her head under Bobby’s blanket. “You going to read for a while?”

“I think so. if it’s okay.”

“Yes, babe. I’ll get ready for bed, put on my eyeshades, and you can read for as long as you want. Just wake me at seven if I don’t hear the alarm and you’re still up.”

“I may be.”

At 3:35 a.m., Katy jerked awake. She tossed off her quilt, sat up, and slid off her light mask. The illumination from underneath Bobby’s blanket stung her eyes, and dozens of white spots floating through her eyes blinded her. She lifted Bobby’s blanket but instantly dropped it. Instead, she talked to Bobby through the blanket.

“I’m sorry. Did I make noise that woke you?”

“No, but the light did. It shone through my mask like the noon sun. Have you thought about reading under the blanket with a Kindle instead? The Kindle is backlit—flashlight technology updated to the twenty-first century.”

Bobby shook his head. “It’s not the same. Kindles didn’t exist when I was twelve. I can’t.”

Katy sighed. “I’ll get a double-layer eye mask. 

At breakfast that morning, Bobby said, “The weirdest thing happened last night.”

“You mean besides your flashlight going supernova?”

Their conversation floated past Anthony and Prim, who spooned Cheerios with one hand as they held their phones with the other.

“I found another chip in the drawer and put it in the flashlight, and wow, did it make everything incredibly bright—”

“I know; it woke me.”

“But I saw something, too, which I didn’t mention because I knew you wanted to go back to sleep. At the intersection where the beam met the blanket, there was a city, but not like any city I’ve known. Monumentally tall buildings, the shape and consistency of rock candy crystals poked through the tops of green and blue clouds. Above them loomed two suns and a ringed moon. I saw beings—”

“Beings?”

“Yes, gangly, yellow and orange humanoids with two antennae that looked like Venus fly traps, mouths that filled nearly their entire face, and tails that whipped from side to side. Their arms extended to their feet and their heads were nearly perfect ovals. Two creatures flew toward my light on a white, rectangular slab. The beings hovered where the light intersected my blanket, touching it with their antennae and scanning it with futuristic instruments. They ran their instruments along the light’s circumference several times. They didn’t see me, or if they did, they didn’t care.”

“Male or female?”

“It could have been either, or both, or something else. They spent several minutes inspecting the flashlight beam before flying back to the nearest building.”

“That’s a vivid dream.”

“It didn’t feel like a dream, love. Dream images are often fuzzy and lack detail, but I saw everything, including strange symbols on their instruments and veins running just under the skin of their antenna.”

“You had a dream. You were reading science fiction, it was late, and while your circadian rhythm said sleep,  your body and mind protested, resulting in a vivid dream.”

Bobby didn’t think so. Dreams feel rushed, but this vision was in real-time. Smells—the creatures exuded the scent of an ocean’s salt water—weren’t usually in dreams. Dreams weren’t hyper-realistic, like what he saw last night. But Katy must’ve been right. What else could it have been? The mind was tricky, and besides, the power of Asimov’s prose could easily have planted the seed for an extraordinary dream. 

He looked at his shaking hand and hoped the dream was a one-off.

The following night, Bobby found another circuit disc in the drawer; curiosity compelled him to put it in his flashlight. How bright would it be? Would he soon have the brightest flashlight in the world, or maybe he already did? Few things felt more like being twelve than the pleasure of discovery. 

The moment Bobby turned on his Rayovac, he slammed his eyes shut. Blood-red light shone through his eyelids. Bobby counted to ten before he opened them, and even then, he could only squint, his pupils peering through narrow slits. Where the flashlight beam lit the blanket, dozens of creatures now congregated, instead of the two he had seen before. A white bridge on which countless creatures lined up extended from his light beam to the city.

The first alien slipped through the light hole, emerging under Bobby’s blanket. 

Bobby screamed and leaped off the bed, the flashlight flying one way, his book the other.

The blanket flew to the ceiling before it fell to the bed’s side. The Rayovac dropped to the floor and broke, but the portal remained open. 

Bobby dashed, his heart barely keeping pace with his legs. As he reached the door, he turned. 

Four beings had now passed through the portal. 

Four of many to come. 

“Run!” Bobby screamed as he bolted from the bedroom. “Katy, Prim, Anthony! Run, run. Get out. Get to the car. Do it now!”

Sixteen hours later, Bobby’s family found refuge at a Howard Johnson hotel off I-57 on the outskirts of Tuscola, Illinois. Bobby would have driven further, but without gas and without open gas stations, this was as far as they could get.

Bobby and Katy sat on the edge of one double bed; Prim and Anthony on the other, as the news broadcast horrifying images. 

Anthony bit his nails. Prim covered her eyes with her hands but peeked through her open fingers. 

Thousands upon thousands of twelve-foot tall yellow and orange aliens marched through cities and towns, destroying everything in their path—cars, buses, trains, buildings, monuments, malls—with their bare hands. Television cameras captured them pulling apart steel girders and crushing thick concrete. How strong were they? Strong enough to fell skyscrapers and rip apart tanks. 

Three aliens toppled Chicago’s tallest building, the 1,450-foot Willis Tower. Thousands of people died when the building collapsed.

Bobby turned his head toward a thunk against their first-floor window. A bat hung from the upper window ledge with a giant white moth in its mouth. 

Brave reporters filmed the invasion. The news was grim, but it wasn’t hopeless: A powerful air-to-ground missile—the JASSM-ER with its 450-kilogram fragmentation blast—killed the creatures, but it needed to be a direct hit, and there weren’t enough missiles in the US arsenal to kill them all. Germany sent its deadly Taurus KEPD missiles to America, and India was airlifting its BrahMos missiles. Nobody wanted their country to be the next battlefield. The invasion would be stopped in America, or it would not be stopped. 

The lone anchor in the CNN studio said, “The aliens appeared out of the blue somewhere in the Chicago area. Nobody knows where they’re from or how they got to Earth. Radar and observation telescopes detected no spacecraft, and there are no reports of alien ships around Chicago or anywhere.” 

But Bobby knew. 

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