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The World in the Evening
As this suburban summer wanders toward dark cats watch from their driveways — they are bored and await miracles. The houses show, through windows flashes of knife and fork, the blue light of televisions, inconsequential fights between wife and husband in the guest bathroom voices sound like echoes in these streets the chattering of awful boys as they plot behind the juniper and ivy, miniature guerillas that mimic the ancient news of the world and shout threats, piped high across mock fences to girls riding by in the last pieces of light the color of the sky makes brilliant reflection in the water and oil along the curb deepened aqua and the sharp pure rose of the clouds there is no sun or moon, few stars wheel above the domestic scene — this half-lit world still, quiet calming the dogs worried by distant alarms there — a woman in a window washes a glass a man across the street laughs through an open door utterly alien, alone. There is a time, seconds between the last light and the dark stretch ahead, when color is lost — the girl on her swing becomes a swift apparition, black and white flowing suddenly into night.