The mountain was covered with a veneer of snow

while I slept, while I didn’t sleep, the silver light of the moon filtered through leafless branches and lit the earth, shadow-spirits walking. Each time I woke, it was brighter outside, and the light spilled through a different window.

I was roused first by the silence after sound

as though something that had teetered on a shelf was undone by a mote of dust, had lost its balance and fallen with a single clatter into my dreams — and I startled as though someone called my name — so that apparently, without cause, there was effect. A ghost is nothing more than accumulated, unnoticed events; if you pay close attention to your life, there’s no such thing as a ghost. If you’re asleep, if your eyes are closed while they are open, you are constantly alarmed by everything you could not expect.

In the wood stove, the quiet embers caught fresh wood, and flame lit the room

flame licked at my eyelids where they would not open and, disoriented by the gravity of sleep which pulled my spirit downward, images of wars past and present flickered to life in my mind. Images of war. One should never see such things, near or from afar. My memory of thunder I imagined to be the detonation of bombs: right here, among my friends, not in some media-sanitized destruction abroad. One should never see such things. When you wake at 4am, what you have seen stares back at you.

The cats sleep curled up close to the fire

often they cuddle together, the light female, the dark male, wrapped tail-around-nose, a living expression of yin and yang, manifest in fur. If you are not overly analytic, relationships can be this easy: presence and warmth, and a bed so small you are forced to wrap yourselves around each other.

Words are a world-spanning form of caress

when arms don’t reach far enough, we can sing, or be sung, to bed.

“Silence” by Sarr Pierre, on DeviantArt.com

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