Gallumphing through darks and hollows like an oil painter filling in the depths where the light doesn’t reach, it ran. Through silent miles that required no brush to bring out the details, it ran. A streak of nothing throttling over rolling prairie dog hills and under cover of those clamorous stars of the visual stage, it ran. Inside of the people’s screens and outside of the people’s consciousness, it ran. Against the turn of the world, it ran.

There was the sound of rustling leaves that accompanies windy autumns and the nightmares of children. There was the deadening of flower heads and dropping of seed pods that nature times perfectly with the eerie beat of seasonal drums. There was the sentinel stare of the blink between starlight that witnesses all of what passes in the night regardless of design or location. With all of these perfectly normal, perfectly unremarkable aspects of the pre-dawn, any stretching traveler of the graveyard shift or weary local insomniac without a television might very well find a lack of evidence for their growing uneasiness. But the uneasiness would be distinct, nonetheless, and icy as a bone-deep shudder. The lack of evidence would likely send them back to the constructed security of their respective dwellings to find the useful distraction of something to do and the useful explanation of something to be.

However, on the side of this rather deserted stretch of highway, there was one who detected the undetectable. She stood in the ditch where drivers had thrown their plastic bottles of piss and efficiency. She stood with her knees deeply bent and her hands hovering parallel to the ground beneath her boot-shod feet. She stood as the leaf-rustling wind moved her hair with the soft care of a lover. She stood as the seed-dropping gravity held her skin on the skeleton with the firmness of a nursing mother. She stood as the stars exploded, looking at the absent moon and listening to the sleeping birds. There was a color of solemnity flowing through the tunnel of her dilated pupils. Holding perfectly still, she could breathe down through the red leather of her soles without disturbing the air around her. In this way, she was able to witness the passage of the shadow’s wake.

It hurdled westward over the highway toward the darker night, spewing the invisible gravel of unsung molecules and unblackened carbon. The heaviness of its flight took her breath away as if the thing had landed inside her body, but knowing the dangers of such identification, she shook off the sensation faster than it came. The creature, if it could be called a creature… no, the phenomenon, if it could be called a phenomenon… no, the vacuum from which nightmares come: it passed before she could even harness awareness of its presence. It was not a presence. It was not present. The concept of “presence” could only to apply to the realm of sentient awareness, something for which the passing engulfment had no access nor concern. It was beyond sensory data. All that could be felt was its wake. A wave of exhaustion was what struck her first, then fear and dread, doom raised to the frequency of panic.

Were she less trained in discernment, she might have assigned these sensations to various thoughts circulating habitual neural pathways, making up a story to match, forging an attachment point. But she knew well enough her own shadow that she was unsurprised by the shapes it took. Dread. Exhaustion. Fear. Doom. Eggshells. Panic. [1] She knew them by name and understood that when these feelings caught her attention fully, they signaled the passage of a shadow through the field, capable of dominating the perceptive field, defining the meaning of all incoming data, amplifying the drama of her mortality. Any seasoned practitioner can tell you: the drama is not the point, but merely pointing. Rest assured, the white-haired red-booted creature crouching in the ditch of an obscure abandoned road was seasoned as a classic salmis [2], so she was focused on the proverbial moon rather than fascinated by the finger. Thusly undeterrable by the shadow-puppets adorning all available surfaces in the winded wake, she kept her attention steady, breathing in open awareness. Cautiously turning her eyeballs as far to the left as they could reach, her hawkeye vision pierced the path of what had so violently shaken unseen perceptions of the earthstar. There was nothing there. Nothing. No movement, no change. Nothing at all.

Feeling the cold rush of the vacuum left in the nightmarish wake, she deepened her breath and turned more fully to the dark of the west. As tremors shook her from head to toe, she peered with disbelief after the monstrous void, unseen and long gone. As the scene to her backside where the earth met the sky turned ever so slightly into the color that only birds can see, she glared into the darkest depth of night her eyes had ever registered.

Before long, they would learn how to register one darker.

-**

1. Def. Dep. eh? Defense Department, in the parlance. Common.
2. May I recommend a nice robust Châteauneuf-du-Pape with that?