Jacob Hyatt

Long After Night Has Fallen

Long after night has fallen, the girl watches the light of the moon swirl and sway its pearlescent waltz about the room, its movements snakelike and vaguely forlorn, its gradations of pale color thrown by fierce gusts of desert wind blowing with abandon through the thin gray walls. Some bleak white copy of an aurora borealis undulating on her dirt floor like something in its death throes. Where the light doesn’t fall, the shadows are deep and alive, their edges aflame with shimmering moonlight but the deepest corners black and untouchable as dreamless sleep. In the makeshift and broken roof above her head she can hear a flurry of wasps moving about in their furious and unceasing revolutions; they have built a nest somewhere up there, and she knows that they will persist long after she is gone. They have already persisted after so, so many. She thinks of dying, and of taking it into her own hands.