It’s on nights like this, when the world is trapped between autumn and winter, that they speak to me. The temperature has dropped to below freezing, and there is a slight dusting of snow on the ground. As I walk, all I hear are our footsteps tapping on the frozen ground. The world is silent.
The dormant atmosphere then provokes a thought: how many of the earth’s creatures died on this particular day?
I ponder this. The number must be enormous—humans, dogs, mice, insects by the thousands… yet how much of it do I see? I have not seen anything die today.
I pass by the house where a woman lives whose husband recently shot himself. He was dying of cancer. There was no way out. She was there when he did it. She heard the shot. She went rushing into the room where he laid; she found his body. Words cannot describe the agony she must have felt.
She must wonder which world he has retired to.
I hear a click from the house and I look over, trying to place the sound. I cannot.
My dog slips on the ice as we near the top of the hill. “Walk in the middle,” I say, tugging his leash toward the center of the deserted road. “It’s less icy.”
The light is fading, and as the inside of my nose comes into contact with the cold evening air, I fall under the impression that my insides are freezing.
My other dog begins to growl. I look over to the side of the road, frightened. A
plastic bag caught in the dying brambles flutters in the wind. “It can’t hurt you,” I say to her. “It can’t even move.”
We turn around at the top.
I see one house adorned with Christmas lights; another still with Halloween decorations. But most houses are dark and unwelcoming.
“Silent night, holy night,” I sing as we descend the hill. My voice wavers with every step, creating a false vibrato. With every word that departs my lips, a wispy white cloud forms in front of my face. My breath looks like a ghost.
That’s when I see it. She has closed the curtains of the front window of her house. That’s what made the noise.
I feel it. He’s here. She’s trying to forget. He died with the summer and is felt most in the winter. He accompanies the loneliness, the lifelessness, the sorrow. Every dead being in this world is present at this moment, and he is among them. She is shutting out death.
It’s nights like this, when the world is numb, that those who are truly dead remind the world of life. The silent world can acknowledge their presence. They walk the earth in this hour of dusk, and on this night, I walk with them.
This piece leaves me as cold and chilly as you probably felt on that walk!
ReplyDelete