He
turned off the TV and listened intently to the silence. There was
something about it, this late-night quiet of the house, the single
low-watt lamp in the far corner, the handful of aromatic candles here
and there...it made the hour different; it made the clock a liar.
Suddenly the night was more present, more immediate, more aged. The
synthetic drone of electronic fiction had kept it disguised, at arm's
length, unnaturally young. As the fatigue of that drone relaxed, all
the subtle ambient nightsounds that go as unnoticed as the color of
paint on a ceiling began to rise and meet his awareness.
A
breath of late summer night wind whispered in his ear from the
half-open window behind him. A call, a beckoning: he understood its
ancient and untranslatable language; he closed his eyes and sighed
deeply, smiling softly.
The
grass wore a sheen of moisture as the heat of the day, vanishing
hastily up into the silent constellations, had left it holding a
cloak spun from the very air that surrounded it. He shut the door as
silently as he could: the soft clamor of such human machinery seemed
unwelcome, even anachronistic, in the pale blue moonlit midnight.
The stars arced with the inexorable grace of the cosmos as the Earth
swung with slow certainty on its constant hinge. Crickets trilled
their songs among the bushes; katydids sang their passions through
the trees. The breeze itself was an invisible dance of a billion
years of Life's ebbing and flowing tides.
Some
time later – whether minutes or hours, he couldn't have said, and
the clock had at any rate proven untrustworthy – he lowered his
gaze from the heavens and passed it over the nearby houses. A single
dimly lighted window here and there attested not only to the
smallness of the hour, but to something warm and safe and common to
the human experience. Not a thing of overt dramatic gravity, but of
quiet sameness: an agreement; an arrangement; a tacit defense
against the profundity of Eternity.
Later
still he lay in his bed, sleeping peacefully, dreamlessly, kept
company by the slow soft whisper of the summer night wind.
*
©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley
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