On the street rests crumbled relics, hardened with time, crushed and oxidized. They cannot be seen from the sagging porch facing the street but their existence is made known by the stressing sound of each individual granule as it scrapes beneath the drifting wheels of the night cruisers. Looking for a quiet place to park, she thought. A drive-in date’s consummation beneath a city floodlight or next to an empty ballpark’s chain fence.

The neighborhood is dark but its details remain defined. The moon glows on each lead glass window pane. She sits on a weathered chair, rocking in time. The cadence of the night.

Her eyes fixed on the wood slats at her feet, thinking of her sister and one afternoon during her childhood, one which she had not yet thought of since. She remembers. Her sister calling her outside, standing with her back to the railing that overlooks the woods at the back of their home. Her sister smiling with her hands above her head holding her ball as she walks through the back door. Her eyes exclaiming as her sister turns and heaves the ball with both arms into the foliage. Swallowed by the woody curtain.

Now, she pauses rocking and lifts a bottle of wine to her mouth slowly until it is quiet and then stands up and moves to the bedroom.

The lights shimmer from atop the canyon. Anxiously he descends, speeding now, cutting through the thick night air.  Awhile later he turns onto their street and slowly slides up to the curb. She’d not stay up on account of his arrival. No, he thought, unlikely.

The windows are dark and lifeless, they too resting in anticipation. Those of the neighbors sit like backlit viewfinders, stationary and insufficiently boundless. Limited yet crude. The windows of the homes across the neighborhoods provide an authentic glimpse of each household. The windows sit asunder but remind him of togetherness, a pleasure seldom afforded by a man whose home is a fleeting road, he thought.

He undresses and finds his way to the bed in the dark, guided by the moonlit edges of the dresser.

*****

It is a hard slumber that is found in the early-morning faint light by a man who travels hitherto by moonlight and headlamps. So is often the case, with an impatient wife accompanied only by wine. But, the immobility of morning brought on by anticipatory inebriation is less burdensome than that of true exhaustion. In either case, the carrying-out of the slumber must be achieved, she thinks.

She sits on the rocker outside again; this time it is coffee that she is within arms reach of. She thinks, best to lest him slumber on. He will rise soon. The intensity of a late-morning sun is such that it was created by the universe to be as profoundly bright as early as necessary to prohibit sleep.

But, it is seldom the presence of the sun that is most apparent, it is the absence of it that is felt the strongest. Residing as a relic in darkness while that which you idolize travels across the opposite side of the planet, a fragment of an arc.

Light’s fading vestige; an unvanquished gratitude at its return. The unfailing arrival and divine presence of it are enough to warrant celebration.