Autopsy of a Lamp

Joseph Randolph

There was a hill beyond the river road where the ground turned black when it rained, and in the evenings you could see it breathing light—soft, like the phosphor of insects under glass. The grown-ups said it used to be an orchard, that the trees had borne something sweet once, though no one alive could name the fruit. Now the hill was bare except for the metal stumps that rose from the dirt like cut throats, each wrapped in a thin crust of rust the color of dried blood. Ji-ho said they were roots that had learned to wait; Hyun-soo said they were batteries, and that someday the earth would remember what to do with them.

I was younger than both of them, but I followed anyway. We would climb the hill after supper, our hands full of wire and glass jars and whatever pieces of old circuit board we could pry from the dump behind the post office. Ji-ho said the light changed with the wind, though I never saw it. To me it was always the same—steady and patient, as if the ground were thinking something through. We knelt in the glow, tracing the cracks that spidered out between the stumps, and sometimes we heard a sound from below, faint as breathing through a wall.

They had a way of talking to each other that felt older than their years, like they had been born into some half-finished argument about what the world still owed us. Ji-ho was the talker, always naming things, always reaching for the language of the adults who had long since given up on it. Hyun-soo listened, not quiet but deliberate, as if he were translating what Ji-ho said into something the hill could understand. When he spoke, it was never to us. He spoke to the ground.

That summer the heat didn’t break for fifty-seven days. The fields turned to clay, and the river retreated into its bed until the stones showed like ribs. We stopped going to school after the ceiling fan fell in the middle of class and the principal said the wiring was done for good. The grown-ups sat in the shade and smoked, their voices dulled by the heat, waiting for the generators to cough back to life. No one talked about the orchard.

One night, Hyun-soo brought a jar filled with water from the river, cloudy and green. He said he wanted to see if it would drink the light. Ji-ho laughed, said light wasn’t something you could feed, but Hyun-soo didn’t answer. He poured the water over the nearest stump and stood back. The glow dimmed, then flared, and for a moment I thought I saw movement—something beneath the soil, shifting, slow as the turn of the moon. Ji-ho stopped laughing.

We began bringing things to the hill. Nails, coins, bits of wire, a broken radio, the body of a sparrow we found stiff under the bridge. Hyun-soo called them offerings. Ji-ho said that was a church word, but he helped anyway. The ground accepted everything without sound or smoke or sign, only that same faint current when we left. We didn’t tell our parents.

By midsummer, the light grew stronger. You could see it from town now, rising through the trees in a pulse, steady as a heartbeat. Some nights it colored the sky pink, and the dogs barked until morning. The grown-ups said it was phosphorus, or heat trapped under the soil, or ghosts from the old plant that used to sit upriver, the one that made the batteries before the flood. Nobody went to check.

The night before it happened, Ji-ho came to my window. He said Hyun-soo wanted to try something. He wouldn’t say what, only that I had to come. We climbed the hill in silence. The air smelled like rain though the sky was clear. Hyun-soo had drawn a circle around the largest stump, lines branching out like veins. In the center he’d placed his mother’s old lamp, the kind that used to burn oil but now stood spent, its glass chimney streaked with soot. He told Ji-ho to stand on one side of the circle and me on the other. He said we were going to give the hill a name.

He took the lamp and held it over the stump. The light below rose up to meet it, and for a moment the air felt charged, like before a storm. Then everything turned white. I remember a sound like air being pulled through a flute, a chambered cry that seemed to come from inside my chest. When I opened my eyes, the lamp was gone, and so were they.

The ground smoked where they’d stood, and the metal stumps were glowing red, each one alive with a trembling light that swelled and burst, like a thousand hearts beating at once. The current rose into a roar, and I ran. From the road I looked back and saw the whole hill burning—not with fire but with light, pure and soundless, spilling down into the river like dawn.

By morning the glow was gone. The hill had gone dark again, smoother than before, as if the light had melted the soil flat. The grown-ups came to look, but they found nothing. No footprints, no metal, no bones. Only the smell of ozone and something sweet, like fruit left too long in the sun. They said the boys had run off, maybe to the coast. I said nothing.

When the river receded, the hill split along the spine like something exhaling. I went out with the others to see what the water had left. Down in the cut, knee-deep in mud the color of ash, were the boys—both of them sunk to the chest, their eyes half-shut against the light. Their skin looked peeled, new, streaked with silt that wouldn’t wash away. Ji-ho’s shirt was plastered to him, covered in a film of yellow pollen or dust so fine it shimmered when he breathed. Hyun-soo’s fingers were raw and pale, the nails gone; he kept them pressed flat against the ground as if steadying it. When Ji-ho opened his mouth a line of water slid out—clear, steady, no sound. The air felt dense enough to chew and smelled like burnt oranges. Somebody called their names, but they didn’t answer. Hyun-soo smiled first, small and deliberate, as if something inside him had just finished counting. Then the wind shifted, and every weed on the hill leaned toward them.

Joseph Randolph is a multidisciplinary artist and professor from the Midwest. He is the author of Vacua Vita (philosophy) and Sum: A Lyric Parody (poetry), and his debut novel Genius & Irrelevance is currently under review. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle, Night Picnic, vernacular., and elsewhere, and he received second place in the 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Award. His music is available on streaming platforms, and his paintings can be found on Instagram @jtrndph.