The Light Is On For You

"The light is ON [picture of a church with a star inside] for you."

This is what the billboard outside the tunnel read. Every morning, Steven looked up and noticed it. "The light is ON," he would repeat to himself. The advertisement was plain enough (cmon in, it's a church, and we'd like to help/proselytize), but what was the meaning of the emphasis? The light is ON.

Earlier in the week, his wife had asked him to leave the light on in the bathroom. As he pulled his hand back from the light-switch, he thought, "I will leave the light ON, not OFF." When he bought his morning coffee, the cashier offered him room for cream in his cup. "I don't want to put any cream IN," he'd answered. The cashier's response was quick, but Steven thought for a moment that she had winked at him. "Fill it UP all the way," she told her coworker.

Steven spent about four hours every weekday commuting. It was during these hours that the nagging details of an unexplained conspiracy teased him. "Now arriving AT...," he thought he heard the conductor say. The person sitting next to him called the office to say, "I'm going to be late TO work this morning."

Was it somehow connected to the church in the advertisement? Could it all be some kind of ecclesiastic campaign to alter the way people speak? Worse yet, was this divine intervention? Might God, should He exist, be speaking to Steven through the lips of others?

One day, he resolved to explore the matter and he called in sick to work, though he pretended to his wife that he had left for the office. "I'm off TO work," he said to her, studying her reaction out of the corner of his eye. He thought she raised an eyebrow, but when she answered "okay, sweetie," Steven couldn't be sure what her pause signified.

When he finally walked through the doorway of Holy Oak Church of the People, he found a small table and on it a stack of blue pamphlets. "The light is ON for you," they read on the cover. Steven stopped to pick one up, when a man in a robe entered the lobby.

"Are you the electrician?" he asked.

"I beg your pardon?" Steven said.

"Are you the electrician? I sent for you hours ago. We have service tomorrow and need the power fixed."

"No power?" Steven asked. The priest shook his head. "No lights even?" he asked again.

"We have candles, if need be," said the priest, gesturing to a cabinet in the corner. "So can you help us OUT?" he added.

Steven felt the sky outside darken and the room, it seemed to him, was suddenly smaller than before. The priest was looking at him, waiting for an answer.