With the moon still under the Atlantic, there were stars, and neighboring houses whose lone lights flickered between the trees, to light the way. The world was more shadow than path, and the shadows were filled with cricket sounds and other, more furtive, nighttime feet. He squinted from the warmth of the doorway, but could make out nothing. “Better…” he thought, and took the small flash that hung beside the door, to make his way across the field.

It wasn’t so late, was it? The dew was already thick in the grass; the cloth soles of his shoes were already wet. The moisture was chill. The air, though, held a touch of warmth from the receding day, and there was no doubt that, within a few days, a week at most, the buds and flowers that were straining toward the sun (were they drawn out by the sun, or pushed forth by the soil?) would explode in pollinous riot, and hayfeverish color.

One… two… three… steps high enough to clear the tall grasses, trying and failing to keep dry, enjoying the failure, empty basket in hands. Then the door. Then the key. Then the light. The few parcels left for his discovery, he arranged in the basket so as not to fall; a short note, sweet as the hand that had written, slipped into a back pocket; the basket, now heavy, riding the right hip. The light extinguished, the door pulled to, the sound of crickets and marsh frogs again, quick to complete the absence of sight, a pause before beginning, a breath.

A breath.

He touched the switch on his lamp, and aimed it home. There before him, in the grass the way he’d come, the soft sheen reflection of the dew from every blade and leaf, silver lacework: but in the shimmer of that flash-light, slightly darker patches where his feet had fallen, ghost-prints of his passage. They looked like time. They could not have been his; yet of course they were.

He stepped into one, and then another. He unwound his footprints backward, to where he had been, returned precisely to where he had begun – the same door, the same stoop, the same stars, the same scene – but could not return to the person he had been, not even ten minutes past.

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