As the sun dies, the lake down the hill—the cliff, really—behind his parent’s house, is normally crystal calm. Normally the water is still enough to mirror the moon quite meticulously, but tonight there is enough wind to breed white caps. And the caps, they shine out in the moonlight of a shy half face. That same wind makes the tree branches clack and the trees themselves rise up in a chorus that is both a hollow moan and a whisper that calls all across the little, dark valley he surveys.

He seats himself in wrought-iron chair and contemplates the darkness of the other side of the valley, across the lake, where nary a single light breaks the darkness of the forest army braving the unusual winds. Orion the hunter lay flat on his back in the heavens, his bow pointed westward toward the departed sun, while Gene wonders what this solstice has brought. He arrived here from a party with candlelight, Yule decorations, a warm fireplace, a potluck dinner, old friends and friends of friends not present; the past a frequent topic of conversation. Now it is quiet with the exception of the wind and some wind chimes in delicate harmony without a song.

It is 2012, and some had laid claim to the idea that this solstice would be the last; the world ended in some unnamed catastrophe. But that had not come to pass, and now the days would begin to grow longer again. In the dark, in the cold calm, he feels that the past is nothing to dwell upon, that the sun that oversaw it all was gone now. What’s next? he thinks, and the chimes accentuate the question with a well-timed trill.

Read the whole thread: A Kind of Acquiescence

Characters and Places: