He stood in the yard, engulfed in a
deep fog. The red hill stood somewhere in the thick, looming larger unseen. It
was easy to imagine this as the end of the world, and in a way it was – the end
in the middle, where all ends meet, pushing their way up tall mountains and
settling finally in a valley. Small orbs of light seeped into the air from
neighbors’ houses, a network of lights, connected to the neighbors beyond,
finally dying out at the edge of the village.
A chill settled in, the kind of
chill that quivered the deep tissues in his chest. His exhaled breath rose for
a moment, then dropped like a stone through water, flipping and tumbling to the
bottom of a pond full of damp air. He wondered why moments like this made him
feel queerly settled, like the days could roll on and he would be content to
stand, stand unchanging and unchanged, waking in the morning, hauling out the waste
water, filling it again, running cold water over hands in a basin, emptying,
filling, trudging to school, lolloping home, a circle of being, being in this
cloud sunk into the village ground.
