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Category: Writing and Poetry
The Brightest Night Ever (The Opposite of Icarus)
"It's the brightest night ever.", she said.
"What do you mean?"
"That's what they said. The moon is the closest it has ever been. Which makes it the brightest night."
As they drove on he contemplated the implications, wondering about the untold millions of creatures that have tides as a fact of life.
He resolved to get into that brightest night for a time, wash his soul in the astringent winter light.
Later, after the others were asleep, after being satiated on the blue light of the screen, he was alone. He welcomed it.
He looked out at the deep snow, blessed by the light that, according to her had never been as close, then made him self ready, then set out. He savored the silence, and felt irreverent for breaking it in his process. He sought the right moment, on the highest, and therefore closest place he could achieve. He wanted To Be There, in the thin, cold air, on The Brightest Night Ever. He shook off the notion of bringing his deer rifle to put in place the Purest action of his life, the final decision. It seemed so right and easily accomplished, in the pure light and the cold, thin air. He quickly banished the surprisingly persistent, yet oddly pleasant notion with the thought of the horror imposed on his family by the discovery of that thing in the woods, especially after the probable discovery first by the family dogs.
He first stumbled a rabbit's stride from the house. He laughed before bringing up the spasm necessary for hoisting one's self from a deep bottomed seat in northern snow. "Glad I got that over with." He was thinking of the Inevitable Fall almost a certainty even after decades of snowshoeing, a lifetime for some.
He entered the forest on a barely perceptible rise, which quickly became an ascent acutely apparent to his thighs, too long without exercise. Was the snow really deeper here? He decided that it was, but also operative were the angle of the slope - making it difficult to lift his snowshoes and feet high enough and the additional exertion from his efforts against the rise.
A seemingly insubstantial twig caught on his shoe and more or less caused the next fall.
He didn't get up right away. He could never again recall how long he stayed there, semi reclined in the deep. He may have even dozed, but came again to alertness enthralled by the silence. This being winter, he realized that winter silence is like no other, as pure as a science can be. He tried to silence the noises his body was making to distraction; his breath huffing from him, the mildly disturbing yammering in his chest
Then, his devotion to the silence was rewarded by hearing an owl in the near distance. He thought of the swift, pure death that was almost certainly being visited upon a small woodland beast, sustaining the owl that came with death's wings, almost invisible in this, the brightest of nights.
As he thought of the death coming from the night sky, he thought it might be a rather pleasant, honorable method of passing. And he thought of Icarus, falling, and proclaimed in an obscenely loud voice, "I am the opposite of Icarus!!"
6:48 AM
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