It is almost dark and the solar light on the deck table has begun to flicker.
The leaves on the trees beneath us sway gently, the hills beyond them somehow resembling the past more than the future. And all around us the night pours in, as if it is one thing and not many. Impenetrable and complete, with or without us.
The light flickers again and somebody makes a joke about a spirit trying to contact us and everybody laughs but still, there is something brittle in the laughter. Everything is softening at this hour and it’s easy enough to imagine a soul loosening itself from the body. People start to tell stories of the supernatural. Tales of coincidence and premonition. Angels and ghosts. Messages in dreams. All these encounters and intuitions unresolved. And when the last story had been told, we sit quietly, goose-fleshed and knowing nothing. All so small beneath the night and the just-glimpsed shooting star above, a luminous proof sent to us from distances and realms unknown.
