Nightjar

Listen. There’s the rustle of the freeway traffic. An occasional nightjar squeaks resentment or alarm, and the gentle tap-tap of another inhabitant trying to find somebody--or something--on IM. The fridge hums and the nightflights to London have come and gone. The mongrel Labrador next door was rowdy; the neighbours let her obsess at the dark and imagined foes until about 11, then they lock her up. In her absense the night hugs still closer to the brown drydrab earth. Someone has birds in a cage and they too complain through the night. Perhaps something like a gunshot will bounce over the valley, or the yelp of rubber on tarmac as the ever-vigilant vultures await a cowboy or a teenager or a shredded businessman taking his guilt home from the beautiful lover to the pyja-mad wife, his mortgage and the BMW his bank will own until just before it starts blowing blue smoke.

Taste. Four cigarettes left. Perhaps they will last until the unease congeals into a thought. No one approves of smoking; not her, not the Surgeon Gerneral. Hemmed in on every side it seems. No breezes disturb the pall. Smell the carcinogens hanging sullen below the ceiling, idle and indolent.

Sight. It’s always a brittle sky in this winter of discontent. The stars coruscate more; how can that be? Touch. They’re no hotter; they’re still as far away. Almost as far as the green-eyed girl, who sits alone at work on a Friday night, tired and frustrated with numbers that don’t add up, puzzling over promises she needs to believe about being connected. She wonders why it's so hard to earn the simplicities of life most seem to take for granted.

Venus hangs there serene as she does most nights, cold and mocking, waiting for them all to see an answer hanging in front of them as easily as she does.