Night

If you would only look out, you would see the star-studded sky and a swooning sickle moon, and down below a fleet of quiet snails sailing gently over lawns scented with newly cut grass. You might glimpse the ugly awkward gait of a dishevelled fox, trotting across a road that had lost its cars by midnight to the garages of suburbia; and perhaps spot a motionless hedgehog sleeping soundly beneath its mattress of bristles. If you would just open up your ears to the night outside, you might hear the howling owl in the primary school wood, and the on-the-hour Swiss cuckoo-clock over at Number Eight crying out, absurdly, for urgency, through an opened window. You would hear cats wauling and hear the swish of bats in the thick dark air, hear the wind softly turning the leaves of trees in search of only the wind knows what, and perhaps hear the tide, which sighs through the night from far away to someone, somewhere. But you won’t. You are lost in the night within, that deepest darkness where no stars shine, no moon lies recumbent, a birdless night shunned by animals, too, a night without roads, without lamps, a nightless night on the edge of death.