In the beginning, there wasn’t much. There was the House, and Fluffs, and the boy. The House was constant; it never changed. It stood still and proud when the loudness came, and it did not bow its gray head when the blueness tore the Whites apart. The House was brave, much braver than Fluffs, and much, much braver than the boy. The House was courageous and quiet, but sometimes the boy heard it talk. It groaned a soft song when it thought the boy was asleep and croaked out a warning when the boy made a wrong step.

Fluffs was not constant. Sometimes Fluffs was brave, like the House, like when furry living things jumped out at the boy when he moved the sheets. But most of the time, Fluffs was cowardly. Fluffs ran when the loudness came and jumped when water fell from the sky. But Fluffs was a nice coward. The boy could hug Fluffs when he was scared; the House was not easy to hug like Fluffs was. The House was rough and cold, and Fluffs was soft and warm.

The boy liked Fluffs, and the House, too. Fluffs understood him when he was sad, and the House protected him when the blueness got angry, so he thanked them before he went to sleep. He thanked them every time the giant living under the ground grabbed the bright, bright light, and the blueness slipped underneath the earth to get it back.

The boy liked the blueness.

The blueness lived above the House, up there where the feathery things walked. The blueness was happy, most of the time. It lived with the bright, bright light, and together they were happy, but sometimes the fluffy Whites stopped by to chat, and then there were three things living in the high place—the blueness; the bright, bright light; and the fluffy Whites. The books the House had called the fluffy Whites clouds, but the boy didn’t think this was a very good name, because the fluffy Whites were not constant like the clouds in the books.

So the boy called them Whites, unless they were gray, and then he called them Grays. It made more sense, that way. Much more sense than “clouds”. Sometimes the Whites were fluffy, sometimes they were smooth, and sometimes they weren’t anything at all. The blueness was always very, very blue whenever there were no Whites, so the boy decided that maybe the blueness didn’t like the Whites.

Maybe the Whites were like the fluffy things Fluffs ate, the things that hurt the boy when he got too close to them.

Maybe the blueness was scared of the Whites.

The blueness wasn’t scared of the bright, bright light, though. The blueness loved the light. When the light shined very, very brightly, the blueness was very happy, but when the Whites came, or when the giant woke up and stole the light, the blueness got angry. When the blueness got angry it turned gray, and sometimes, the blueness got so, so mad, that it would yell and tear the Grays apart.

The boy didn’t like when the blueness got angry, so when the light disappeared, he tried to make his own. He thought maybe doing that would make the blueness happy, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. If it didn’t, then the boy hid under the covers because he knew that the blueness was going to start yelling; if it did, then the boy did not hide.

Today, the boy was hiding. Today the blueness was not blue at all; it was a nasty, nasty gray, and the bright, bright light was gone. The boy was surprised by the blueness’s anger. For several days the blueness had been very, very happy. The bright, bright light had been shining even brighter, and there had been no Whites, fluffy or smooth, for quite a while. The House had been warm, too, and if there had been a wind, it had been soft and pleasant and nice, like Fluffs when the boy gave him a can of wet meat.

But then the wind had started to pick up, and now the Whites were suddenly everywhere. They hid the bright, bright light away; today, the boy hadn’t seen it all, and so he was preparing. He took Fluffs and the House’s books and the House’s sheets and a not-so-bright-bright-but-still-very-bright light and he made for himself a safe little space in his favorite room in his beloved House.

He took the sheets and the rickety-rockety chairs from the room with the machine that could make fire in its belly and he set them up so that they made for him one little roof and three little walls. Then he took Fluffs and Fluffs’s bed of brown board and old chewed up coats and he set them inside the little home, and he placed the House’s books and his not-so-bright light beside Fluffs and Fluffs’s bed. And, because he did not want Fluffs to get hungry, and he did not like having to walk around in the House when the blueness was yelling, he brought up many, many cans of wet meat and salty crackers, as many as he could hold, and he put them in the little house.

And then, after he had done all this, the boy grabbed a pillow from his bed, and he climbed into the little house. And it was very good that he had done so, because just as his foot slipped underneath the cover of the House’s sheets, the blueness began to roar.

The sound was bearable at first, like the blueness was just starting to argue with the Whites, and then it became a dull roar, and then a loud scream that shook the House and made it rain white flecks from the ceiling. Everything was very, very dark, and something like hammers was battering the House, and it hurt the House so badly that it began to groan and moan just as loudly as the blueness screamed.

The boy had never seen the blueness get so angry before. Even when the giant took the bright, bright light and tore it up, the blueness was never so angry as to scream and beat the House. The blueness always got the bright, bright light back from the giant and the Whites, no matter how small or many the pieces.

The blueness’s unparalleled anger terrified the boy in a manner he had never experienced before, and so he clutched Fluffs very, very tightly to his chest, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and he tried to think about something other than the way the House shook and the blueness cried and the giant bellowed.

The blueness shook the House very, very hard, so hard that the House’s groans became wails and the cracks in the walls began to splinter and deepen. The blueness and the loudness were so great that the boy felt the House begin to bend, and he felt in him a sudden and terrible fear.

The House, which was so great and so brave and strong, was caving under the yells and the batterings of the blueness. The House shook like it was made of paper and not wood, and the hammers the blueness threw down tore at its shingles and banged its walls.

Something sharp dug into the boy’s arm, and when he opened his eyes he saw that Fluffs’s claws had sunk into his skin. Something dark and red bubbled from underneath Fluff’s pale claws, but the boy did not know what it was.

Then the boy heard a loud cracking and splintering sound, and then a loud crash, and then Fluffs’s bed and the House’s books and some of the rickety-rockety chairs and sheets went flying away. They were taken by a very powerful and very angry wind, the same which had torn off a great big piece of the House.

Now the boy could see the world outside, and the world outside could leer back at him. The blueness was tearing the Whites apart, ripping them and splitting them and sending them hurtling away. The Whites bled water, and it poured down from the high place in droves as big as the House itself.

The water splashed inside the House, through the gaping hole the wind had made, and the wind tore at the insides of the boy’s room, ripping off books and grabbing cans of Fluffs’s food and bags of the boy’s crackers. The sheets that had not fallen with the piece of the House the wind had stolen were soaked by the water, and they, in turn, soaked the boy and Fluffs and the House.

Fluffs made a pitiful noise and the House wailed and the boy cried, and through his tears he saw the wide, ruined world; all the blacks and brown and grays pressing against the House, torn asunder by the cold fingers of the wind and drowned in the blood of the Whites. He saw the broken bones and fleshy insides of places like the House; the frothing, muddy waters rising to swallow the things that once were; and the blueness high above, angry and gray and alien.

And sometimes there was light. It was brief and blinding and when it came the boy could see every hair upon Fluffs’s head, and every splinter and crack in the House’s floors. But the blueness did not notice the fleeting bright, bright light, and the boy thought perhaps if the blueness could just open its eyes it would see that its bright, bright light was not lost at all.

So the boy grabbed his not-so-bright light with shaking hands, and he shined it up at the blueness, and he told it that the bright, bright light was right there, if it just looked—

The blueness let out a sudden, loud, booming roar, none like the boy had ever heard before, and Fluffs, who had been clinging to the boy’s arm and shirt, hissed and wailed and flailed around in the boy’s grip. Fluffs’s movements made it hard for the boy to keep his grip, and Fluffs slipped from his arms and then took off further into the House.

The boy moved to follow Fluffs, but then a muddy, frothing wave, twice as strong as the House and taller than any house the boy had ever seen, barreled through the jagged hole, and threw the boy into a wall. The wave kept him pinned there for a very, very long time, and when it finally did draw back, it took with it the boy’s strength, and not-so-bright light, and rickety rockety chairs and sheets and everything save for the boy himself.

The boy had been thrown so forcefully into the wall that his head had left a dent in the plaster, and when the force pressing him into the wall receded, he slid down to the floor. Smears of something dark and red covered the wall, trailing downward from the dent the boy’s head had made, and pooling out of the gash in his head.

Without his strength or his not-so-bright light, the boy’s body was a heavy pile of bones and flesh. His head sat against the wall, and the redness bubbling up from the gash warmed the skin it touched. The boy couldn’t move his head, and he struggled to keep his eyes open.

The colors in the House bled into the colors in the outside, and the boy’s eyelids grew as heavy as the rain hammering the House. He couldn’t feel his fingers, or his hands, or his feet. He couldn’t feel anything but his heart, beating slower, and slower, and slower.

The boy tried to open his mouth to call out to Fluffs. He wondered if Fluffs was okay, or if the wave had taken Fluffs away.

He didn’t think about the blueness, or the loudness; he didn’t think about hiding, or about fearing the blueness and its wrath. The boy thought of nothing but Fluffs and the House, and then a moment later, when his eyelids slid closed, he thought of nothing at all.

The House moaned, and Fluffs made a sad little noise.

But the boy made no noise at all.