Love Is Sweeter, fiction by HC Hsu

Eric In the sunset without a sun, the sky looked like a large, flat piece of white, opaque paper.

He looked at this canvas, so even, homogeneous, seemingly without edges. It extended beyond the small, continuous hills, which were black.

There were some houses on the hills, but they had fused into one with the mountain, disappeared under the shadow, into the blackness.

The water was the reflection of the sky, in the same dull whitish gray; there were a few small black fish swimming in it, making little ripples around him. He stood still, with his thighs half-submerged.

Because of the recent, unusual rain, the lake rose. A few feet from the gray sand banks, the water used to come up to his heels. Now even the metal railing was almost all underneath.

Everything was either sinking, or resurfacing. The city of Atlantis.

Soon it became completely dark, and he got out. * He didn’t know how he got out of the hospital that day.

He just remembered making turn after turn—it was a labyrinth, every double door was the same, clean white, as every other double door, he pushed through one, and couldn’t tell if he had just come from the other side, the same hallway down either direction. The gates were still flapping by each other.

It wasn’t easy.

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