Storytime: Nightfall.

February 2nd, 2011

Under the last, shuttered rays of the sun, a night was being born.  It was so quick it seized the eye true and strong; one moment, splintered light fading into greyness under the aegis of evening; the next, true blackness filled the air. 
For a moment after it was birthed, it didn’t know anything.  Just dark, flowing over the world.  But then it blinked, it stretched, it laughed, and then its mind began. 

The first thing the newborn night saw was that the world was big, and it was big in it.  A more pleasing combination of wonderment and vanity could not be found anywhere under the moon, and it gloried mightily in it, roiling happily against hills and sliding into dales with the cheer of a sporting otter.  It wriggled with delight as the treetops stroked its soft, velvety underbelly, squirmed its way over crags and jags and a great, battered horn to stare down all over the land all around it, like a toddler perched on a runty tree stump. 
Hello! it called to the world around it, challenge and greeting most jovial.  Hello hello! it called to the quiet that clung to itself.  Wolves sang at its introduction, owls nodded curtly, the impertinent little lights that shone in big cities flickered uneasily with the defiant stupidity of a child caught in the wrong and refusing to admit it.  Hello!
The night paid them all no need as it journeyed on, examining and discarding them all, an endless curiosity confronted with an endless basket of wonders.  Here – there was water flowing over a cliff!  Who could imagine that?  There – here is a lake filled with surly, slovenly, brown-bellied sharks that snap at anything that dares intrude on their prickly sense of personal space.  Who could’ve dreamed of that?  The night did and more, peering at the strangeness that greeted its every step forwards. 
There!  A little opening under a hill, a nook that widened farther and farther where the night could not see, where a deeper darkness pooled from.  It was old, and ignored its cheery introduction with stone-cold resolution.
Here!  A little tree on a sheer mountainside, growing not up so much as out.  It was older than some of the rock around it, fancied the night, and its needles were thinner than a pixie’s dreams, its roots great, bulging muscles that clung to the rock with strength unmatched on the earth. 
Look!  A glittering wonderland hiding inches under the waves, a breadbasket of corals that stretched for hundreds of miles.  Its fishy inhabitants glittered and shone under the slightest speck of light, their tumultuous little lives never pausing, not even for the night’s touch. 
See!  A rainstorm, a thunderstorm, a cauldron of bubbling lightning that rumbled in approval as the darkness wrapped around it and filled its heart with deeper chill. 
All this and more spread itself beneath the freshly-budded wings of the night as it flexed and tested and flapped them.  It slowed to watch, it sped to prove it could, it rolled and flipped its way over the horizon, eating the air.  It was perfectly happy and nothing troubled its mind but for a faint worry and a memory of sharp bright fear, and they were nothing, only premonitions, which you couldn’t trust, the night was sure.  It was sure. 

It began to turn its gaze above.  There was so much above. 
For one thing, there was the moon.  It was so close and yet so far, bobbing just within the night’s domain yet separated from its grasp by a space that shocked even the night’s mind.  It was a pity, to see something so far-away and beautiful remain untouchable, yet strangely thrilling.  For the first time, the night felt smaller.  It hallooed to the lunar sphere, a big bobbing gibbous demiscircle that winked down at it with old ease, the poise of a high lady mixed with the familiarity of an auntie. 
For another, the stars caught its gaze, even as it removed it from the moon.  There were so many!  The first glance saw hundreds, the second thousands, then more, and more, and still more millions, endless numbers clotting the empty skies thick and sweeter, smeared deliciously from near to far, the nearest oh so far.  The night was in awe at them, and a little bit frightened (though it didn’t know it).  Something about their twinkle brought on strange memories-that-weren’t, and left it uncertain.  It had the feeling it was being chased. 
It called up in pressed happiness to the stars, a forced self-reassurance, and they smiled back sadly.  Soon, soon, they whispered where they hung, near to the eye and farther from the hand than anything that was ever dreamed of.  Always so soon.

The talk of the stars unnerved the night, as did their continued quietude, and its eyes were (if not quick) eager to fall back down from the dizzying heights and depths that adorned its above-space and rest once more on the spinning display beneath it.  It watched with detachment unwanted as a moose stumbled loose from a thicket, clumsy even in grace, and that helped a little.  It cheered up still more as the moose’s calf followed it, twice the leg and half the presence of mind-in-body, barely able to walk but masterful in wobbling.  Then it was gone again, swirling away in the night’s long wake as it sped through the hours and miles.  It alit upon a crooked fencepost, and for a moment it was quite pleased to see eye-to-eye with a cowled old corbie that huddled itself on its tip, cynical old bird rendered speechless, but then it was off and away, dragging itself low over the land with reluctant haste. 
Perhaps speed should be embraced then, decided the night, if only because it was so persistent.  So it did, it sped.  Up came its haste, down and away flew its patience, and it was off like a shot from the gun that spun the planet, whirling with the force and might of a thousand dervishes.  It barely saw the passing sights, spinning mountains dark within an instance’s worth of note.  It felt the tickle and tremble of long landscapes against itself fade into a soothing, strikingly homogenous hum that filled its soul.  The sky streaked with white on black, dots in a seascape, and under its hands oceans bled away nearly as fast as the continents, passing from blue to black and blacker still.  It was the purest speed in the world, and no other thing knew it but the night.  It knew this deeply, drank it in heartily; it laughed loud and long as the haste soused its mind, sending it into crazy cartwheels that would’ve dashed any other thing’s brains apart just from thinking them.  Whatever it was that chased at its heels was beyond sight of mind, far away and never there, and it was free of all worry. 
And then, cresting a valley’s rim, it looked down and made a mistake, the same mistake anyone might make, anywhere, and it saw what it was doing. 
Boys going lost in the fields, sent out to call in cattle and caught by the sudden dark.  Fawns seized with sudden cold that huddled to their mothers for warmth as their time to browse was cut short and replaced with the hours of the predators, muzzles pressed into sides and flank to fur. 
Owls seized by instinct’s awakening before they could so much as wake, gliding out of their homes still wishing sleep. 
Sun-baked crags forced fast from weathering the heat to the chilly grip of the darkness, cracking before their time, splintering to gravel. 
All these things were small, and as such, all the more notable, and for each of them there were a thousand more so alike that the night could barely look for seeing them.  All around it, little troubles, small pains, and each an accusation by dint of its lack of accusation.  No blame fell on the night, not for the harm that it caused in innocent speed, not so much as a disapproving look or a plaintive plea, and for that it cut all the deeper. 
So it slowed.  It idled.  It took its time, took it all back, and meandered its way through the skies it had galloped against so furiously mere moments before.  It watched anxiously what it had so free-and-easily ignored in favour of the call of the rush and thrill – it hurt more, it did, responsibility.  To be carefree was to be painfree, but somehow, the night felt a little proud of itself as it saw the world shape itself right again under its cloaked depths (though not too proud, of course, because that made it feel bad again). 
Also, something was nagging it, those not-recollections again that the stars had whispered of to it.  Soon, soon.  Whatever it was, it would come all the sooner now.  Yet still, though the feeling of pursuit grew ever stronger, not a single hint nor scent of whatever that was chasing it appeared at its rear.

For a time it became (if not routine) calm.  There were fewer sights now for that night that took its breath away, fewer wonders.  The world was big and full of uniqueness, but even that grew mellow with experience, if never tedious.  Living and land alike passed by its mind and sight, and it noted them with care.  It was nearly a challenge in itself now, to see how many things it could see as they came under its shroud before they were whisked away into its wake.  What had once frustrated it became a sport, a counting of many tallies that was made all the more challenging by the night not having any numbers to count with.  It found an abandoned textbook of maths lying on a park-bench, but it was closed and unhelpful, so it passed on carefree and ignorant.  Numbers were easier when you didn’t know them, anyways.  And sooner or later the counting wore thin too, and by now the night was old enough that it could simply appreciate the calm, coasting on a hemisphere’s-worth of momentum that wouldn’t end.  It was soothing, letting it all roll by at its own pace, hearing the slow running down of life and matter underfoot as it calmed under its touch. 
But there was something stronger warning it now, an alarm bell ringing inside the night’s mind.  Something touching old not-memories and stiffening what could’ve been hairs along a possible-spine.  There was something chasing it, yes, yes, but it wasn’t coming closer from behind.  The night had left it far away, that way, no matter its chosen speed (from swift to sloth, it was all the same, it seemed), but there was still something there
Then the night looked forwards, and it saw something, on the edge of perception.  It was strange and flat and it looked something like starlight, but harsher, stronger. 
The memory was real, and it had a name: daylight.  It chased from ahead. 

For a passing moment the night knew no fear, only surprise.  The first sharp slivers of the bright were still blinking into existence, slow but sure, implacable.  It saw the tatterings of twilight beginning to appear at its outermost edges; it was shocking to see the raiments of its birth returned this way, at this moment. 
Past the shock came terror.  The night stalled desperately, snatching at its surroundings, grasping at obstacles with panic in its soul.  All slid away from it in a gentle caress, the same frictionless ease that had felt so pleasing and now seemed devilish.  It tore and snatched and smashed for something, anything that could touch it besides that growing glow on the horizon, the herald of something new, the star that smouldered too close and too strong for it. 
Things stirred in the land beneath, thousands upon thousands of things, far more than had wandered quietly in its depths (all abed now; the owls a-roost, the bats be-caved, the hunters and predators a-rest), awakening at the stroke of shine.  The night was more grey than black now, rent through with smouldering rays.  It balked at their touch, impaling itself on them even as it struggled, fading apart.  And up ahead, where the balelight glared, it could hear the nightmare yammer of the endless swarms of things that screamed and grunted and stank under the burning pyre of the skies, a cacophony of billions that knew no rest and no concord, the antithesis of its calm. 
The night quailed.  If it could, it would have wept.  It stretched from the heavens to the soil, it girthed from pole to pole, and all of its breadth and majesty was about to be cut up and swept away by the glare.  It almost averted itself, sought to become lost in the details of that it washed over (thinly now!), to distract itself from the end.  But something spoke to it in the last bits of its truedark, whispered to look its fate soundly face-to-face. 
Slowly, the night looked up.  Past the brightness, the new colours that cut its eyes with their loud sharpness, up and up to the hint of a handful of pure light that was touching it from just above the trees, the edge of the near-star.  And there, watching it back, was the hint of something shining and small.  So small.  So very bright and so very full of pain, but so small. 
And there was a worry in it that the night knew as its own. 
The night gazed back at it and at itself.  It was crumbling, but it was still impressive.  Pole-to-pole, heavens-to-soil.  It reached to the moon that it could not reach (was it gone now?) and saw even the stars so far.  What must it look like now, to this little stranger that was kin, watching it anxiously now, seeing if this groaning ancient would lurch forwards at last and swallow it up?
The night remembered very little of its childhood now.  There had been twilight, swallowing light.  There had been a terrible light, but it had stopped chasing it, had faded away as the night fled, crumbled into its trail and left it running free and wild across the skies. 
The night thought.  It had time for that much, even as it wore thin.  And then it reached out (surely, slow but swift!) and touched the dawn. 

It burned, but only for a moment.  The day shrank, but only for a moment.  And for a moment, just for a moment, the night realized that this wasn’t so bad. 
Then it was over, splintering into a thousand quarrelsome little shadows and shades, slipping into trees and under stones, diving into the bottoms of ponds to wait for the sun to pass again. 
For now, it shone true, and the new day blinked to itself in confusion, surrounded by folding darkness and watching the hills dawn rosy. It didn’t know anything, and all that was, was light.  There had been something chasing it, but there was something about the way it had looked that wasn’t quite right, not quite like that, a memory that wasn’t there. 
Then it blinked, shook itself, and sang, and its mind began. 

 

“Nightfall” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011. 

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