This Month's Story

It’s getting late. I save my work and then check my computer, to see if I have any messaged. There are no messages. I’m done for the day. It’s late.

At my feet beside me, extended out on the floor, lies my black tom, Luci. Now that I’m done for the evening, I will have to wake him to leave my office. He lies still, stretched away from me, not really asleep, waiting in a semi-doze for me to get up and go to bed.

I look at him and realize I don’t want to move him. While he lays there and I don’t move, I realize that our time is frozen. In the brief time of our lives together, I have learned to love him, and, much to my amazement, I have found that he evidently feels the same about me. He stays with me in this room for that very reason. He and I are alone in a speck of a long series of temporal specks that extend back for all of our brief part of eternity. I have no understanding of the whys or reasons for this but it is so.

Earlier in the evening when I sat down to check some work that I had been doing on the computer, Luci had jumped up on the desk, meandered through the multitude of wires behind my two screens. He moved carefully among the jungle of wires and did not touch a one; then he laid down on the broad Corian window sill to stare out the window on one end of my desk. He lay there for a long time, watching the oncoming night. He does this often in the late evening. He will stay there even when it is becomes completely dark. He sees things in that dark and watches those things closely.

I don’t have his ability’s and to me the window is a just a big patch of black, but I know he is seeing things; While he lays there he often leans forward to watch something either on the nearby stone wall that separates my land from the farmer’s field beyond or beyond the wall in the farmers field itself.

Earlier, a train had whistled on the track about a half mile further up our country road, so I know there are things out there. Whistle is not really the word for the noise a train makes, certainly the moan or whatever the sound is, is not a disturbing noise and if I had not been watching Luci, I would not have even realized that the engine and the long drawn out murmur of the rolling stock behind it had passed. The track runs north-south beside the long ridge to my east and its whistle uses the ridge as its own private echo box and its mournful wail spreads out across the comparatively flat land to its west.

The noise is nothing to Luci; he lies there still, not moving, waiting. I am the deciding component here. If I decide to go, he will go.

We live on this farm now, far from the place where water was the reminder at night that there were things beyond my desk window. That home lay by the water’s edge and I could hear things that told me what was taking place between me and the water, as well as in the water itself. Many things happened and I could as a waterman tell what each of them was. Not seeing them, knowing they were there only by their noises were all I needed.

That home by the water is long ago gone and I have found myself not knowing but at least accustomed to the blackness of night that makes up my more recent office window. I can hear at times the occasional sound of a freight train moving its long way against the side of the tall ridge that makes the first of wrinkled highlands we call the Laurel Highlands. But now it is late and Luci has moved to the floor at my feet. He lies still; patently waiting for me to get up and call an end to this day’s passage of his and my time.

I stare at the two screens in front of me. They hold nothing of interest. If I get up now Luci will wake instantly from his non-nap and we will go back to our bedroom where Stella, has already closed her day.

I don’t want to go. I want this day to go on for ten thousand years with its black windows and mournful trains; but leaning forward, I press the two sleep button on the screens and the computer makes the inhuman noises it always makes at these times and turning off the desk light, I stand up and go.

Lucy from his position on the floor, moves back into our private tonight-land and follows me.