Story five: removed cos I'm submitting it for publication

It's going to a prestigious online magazine that I like, so wish me luck. If it gets in I'll put a link to it at the magazine site, until then I don't want to jinx it.

Do you miss it already? Do you?

OK, here's the beginning of something I'm not sure I can be arsed to finish. Thoughts welcome. (I nicked the title from someone's username - email me if you're annoyed, ABTOG).

A beautiful tunnel of ghosts

Mato is in the shower when the lights go out. The tepid water continues to hiss around him, louder and harder now that he’s in the pitch black with his hands cupped as though in supplication, just about to shampoo his hair. He stands still for what feels like about a minute, waiting for the glow tiles in the ceiling to stutter back into life. Nothing happens. The water pummels him. The bathroom is windowless. The darkness is total.

Mato raises his hands and starts to lather his hair. His eyes sting as foam drips into them. He doesn’t have a mirror in the shower, and never thought he’d need to be able to see just to wash his hair, but in the dark he is clumsy, banging the sides of the cubicle as he raises his hands, poking himself in the eyes and ears as he tries to rinse his head. He cannot find the dial to turn the water off, and flails around, fingers splayed, trying to grasp it. He is beginning to get scared. What if the cut is longer this time? Last week it was only a few seconds, like a missed heartbeat; everything went off and, almost at once, back on again. He hadn’t been sure until this moment that he hadn’t imagined it. You got some funny ideas in here. That’s what the optician had said.

There’s a sharp, metallic cough from the ceiling and the tiles flare, then start to glow softly, building up to full luminescence. Mato shivers with relief. He's somehow got turned around while the lights were out, and the shower dial is far from where he thought it was, almost nudging his left hip. He twists off the water and steps out of the cubicle.

When he isback in his room, dressed again in his thin, damp stripes, he thinks about the cut. He bows his head over his breakfast mash and moves the spoon around, but doesn't eat. They can't give you hours for not eating, unless it's a hunger strike. What does it mean? This place is supposed to have failsafes up the wazoo. In theory, it can't lose power. It says in the manual that you have to adjust to constant illumination, that it takes the average person a few weeks to adapt. So what's going on outside that they’ve had not one but two cuts in the last week?

“You have lost the right to privacy,” the manual says, “therefore you have lost the right to darkness”. During the hours of sleep, the ceiling tiles dim but never go out. Mato guesses that it's cheaper to have them on all night than to use infra-red cams. It's all about economies of scale, in the end.