She finds her way down the hillside in the late night dark, making no use of a flashlight habitually held in one hand. If she switches that light on the world will be invisible, becoming only what is held in the constricted circle of the beam.
Besides, her feet remember the road, and snakes don’t lie there in the cool night.
Why was he so surprised?
There is no moon now. It rose much earlier, pallid in the gray dusk, and disappeared behind old trees that shield the house from a county road. Everything is dark except for fireflies that lift and swirl across a small pasture beside the drive.
And overhead, galaxies.
Gravel crunches beneath her step, tumbles away from the touch. Where the drive bends in front of the old barn, she finds herself on lush wet grass, plump and potent. She waits a moment to find her way, then moves on downward, following the curve of the road, of the wall along the pasture edge.
She knows how boulders in that loose rock wall are shaped. She could find her footing to cross it, could walk over all the burrows of creatures who live there, probably out hunting now or hiding from hunters.
On the other side of the wall a horse stamps and snuffs, warm, friendly bodies shuffling there, just beyond the watering trough. The water glitters slightly, reflecting only lights from the house behind her.
Walking down the drive, she wonders again why he had seemed so shocked when she told him she was leaving. Surely he would be content, free of her expectations. But there had been so many years …
Then the swirl of fireflies catches her attention. They rise and dance against the black hillside like snowflakes falling upward into a dark bowl. They make her think of distant worlds, unchartable stars, a place of unaccustomed light.
A sound off to her left, a faint odor, a skunk making its own way through the night. From inside a small shed, a chicken mutters, perhaps wakened from an uneasy dream of sharp teeth. She moves off slowly.
Why was he so surprised?
Didn’t he understand what had been dying for so long?
Now she is far enough away to turn and see the house squarely. She remembers morning glories beside the front porch last spring. They writhed with life, their buds snapped into blossoms. They had filled her mind. Over and over again she had painted what they showed her—the pull of one thing on another, times and spaces interwoven and riddles unexplained.
From here, the house lights look weak, but she can still sense unforgiving ghosts haunting that light. Behind those windows, the man she has been with for years. No longer there, the children grown now, but children never forgive whatever it is you do or don’t do. They won’t even tell you what it was, and she cannot make up for anything now.
A multidimensional dark fills the space between her and the old dwelling. Out here in the night there is only the universe turning overhead and turning again in the air around her. The sound of a horse’s hoof distracts her as the animals stroll curiously down the pasture, knowing she is there, wondering what she is doing and whether she is bringing food. She stands for a moment in the hollow at the bottom of the hill. When the horses lean across the gate, she goes to them and reaches out to stroke one gentle warm head. The tears in her eyes are picking up light from somewhere, but whether the house, the fireflies, or the stars she cannot tell.
How can she leave this? How can she leave all of this?
She goes on, following the curving drive out through the farm gate and toward the county road. She has made this walk many nights and many days, often with others.
Tonight she stands on the road alone, and the house is lost behind sheltering trees. For a long time, she had thought she would leave in the daylight, when nothing could be seen, when everything would be obscured by the light, by everyday things brought into focus, and familiar voices would pose sensible questions. Not important, they always said, and she had believed it was true, without realizing then how unimportance trivialized life.
Tonight she would keep walking if the world would just stay dark and magical. For surely the human soul was as complex as the weather, as unpredictably shaped by its own resignations but also by resistances, such small things repeated in large, incomprehensible, unpredictable ways.
She glances upward to unfamiliar galaxies, then follows the road toward them.
