The Novelist

'Twas the night of that particular evening whose noon-tide bade wondrous twilights and whose moon suffused in its consummated prophecy. Men perched themselves around balefully dire fires and professed eerie tales to themselves in unsettling delight; tales that forebode dark, lurid prophecies of, according to legend, loathsome howls that molest the hearts of young men and women. These swain starlets, unlike anything avowed in prophecy afore, had their own mysteries and developed their own enigmas and whose particular temperaments spurn dreams that keep the heavens afloat. On that very evening aforementioned, an impoverished and somewhat educated young man sat wearingly in his sofa with eyes affixed upon the hearth whose eerie gaze sullenly flickered in the crackled furore of midnight's fire. "Unbeknownst to legend", he thought, "man makes his own dreams and dreams thereafter make men". He tilted his head slightly- proud of his attempted aphorism, and he outstretched his arm and repealed the glass of fine whisky to his chest and lifted it to his mouth and took a sip and smiled sneeringly. As he placed his empty glass on the floor, he let his weary eyes wander around the dark and rather hollow room whose empty walls echoed the beseeched pendulum of an old grandfather clock in the corner that was gathering dust. The moon's lustre danced on the windowpane and the night cried a billowing wind that howled unlike anything the darkness avowed before. Now with his sneering smile adjourned, he befouled the night with its novelty and its apparent lack of purpose. He frowned and glowered at the moon and damned it for all his ills and he cursed the stars for their sparkle. "Why must the sky scintillate and shimmer whilst we here on Earth face death and dolour?" "If fate pertains here then it surely lacks an artistic taste of any kind, for to be artistic is to be beautiful and the most beautiful thing we can experience is the enigmatic; the incomprehensible and the inexplicable for it has been called the source of all true art and science". He slowly raised himself from his incumbency and hurried over to the window and emphatically closed the tapestries as they flickered in motion from their forceful closure. The precocious man returned to his arm chair with its rather haggard ottoman-footstool and grabbed his empty notepad to orchestrate ideas for his next novel about the despairing realities of life with its disfigured values of virtue and beauty. As he fell asleep, a gentle tapping could be heard on the window. A small robin peered in from a small aperture between the tapestries. It cried ever so gently for the fire with its warmth and it longed for its lambency. As it continued to stare, its sleepy tears trickled down the window...for it knew the blessing of beauty.