Page 360 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

harvest. They started there because the end was an explicit
affair, while beginnings were almost entirely implicit—easy
to miss, harder to capture, requiring a seasoned artist with an
eye for the hidden. In fact, the only thing more difficult to
render, in its approximate completeness, was a dream, which
was both causeless and endless, yet it begins and ends—
paradox incarnate. This should do well to explain why I was
not a photographer—one cannot photograph a dream.
When the sun was all but dead, I came upon the remains
of a house, destroyed almost entirely. Its placement within
the densest crowd of trees the woods had to offer—at the
foot of a meandering boneyard, no less—intrigued me. The
solemn photographer had entered the structure, and so did
I. Its rooms were thoroughly destroyed by the weapons
and workers of the woods—vines, weeds, burrowing and
nesting things. Rooms little more than bones of an ancient
industry sheltered various night-things, creatures preferring
the darkness of natural enclosures, the corpses of forgotten
dead, and the inattention of sun-loving prey. One after the
next, crumbling rooms appeared and vanished from my
focus, the tracks casually picking through the various debris.
Suddenly, and without suitable preface for such a bizarre
thing, a room darker than it had occasion to be appeared.
Daylight still lingered the various entrances to the place,
a lilting glow that, while diminished, should have had its
way with the thickest natural darkness. But the black hung
like a curtain across the threshold, nearly tangible, decrying
any and all illumination. Gently disturbed by a cautious
breeze, the sable curtain even reacted as if a material thing,
however slightly. I reached out to touch it—cobwebs and
cold. I pushed through it, and a membrane of outer darkness
admitted me. The space within was completely free of light,
not a speck staining the air. The cold and dark were a unified
force here, molded from purpose, surely. My eyes, stunned
for the absence of obedient shadow, struggled for signposts.

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