The Forest Clearing at Dusk

The trees give way all at once, and you step out of the close green dark into a clearing the colour of failing gold. The grass here stands tall and unbent, waist-high and silvered wherever the last of the light catches it, and the air is noticeably cooler and cleaner than the heavy wood you left behind. Midges hang in slow, drifting columns above the turf, turning like motes of dust in the low sun, and the ground gives softly underfoot, springy with years of fallen needle and leaf.

Ringed all around, the old trunks lean inward like a circle of listeners drawn close to hear a secret, their crowns already knitting the sky shut overhead. Beyond that first rank of trees the forest has gone entirely to blue shadow, depthless and quiet. For a long moment nothing at all moves — not a leaf, not a blade of grass — and the stillness has a held-breath quality, as though the whole clearing is waiting to see what you will do. Then, far off and high, a bird you cannot name calls once, a single falling note, and does not call again.