The Gloaming

Mid-December, a harvested field set into stillness by last week's snow, in the world called the Gloaming. The artifacts of humanity--farmhouses, power towers, gritty roads lined with mailboxes--stand silent in the light of a sun that never rises, never sets. This world is eternal, neither coming nor going, but ever-waiting, its pines always dusted with white, its harvest remainders poking through the snowcrust, missed wheat, one stalk bent at the middle, hanging its head. Mice flit through secret tunnels, glowing white. A crow surveys the land, head cocked, swiveling, cocked, voiceless until it becomes the Voice, a caw across the air. Old bootprints still mark the snow where someone once walked to grab a hunk of aged apple from the woodpile. Is it getting dimmer? No, no, that's only this iris growing drowsy. The sun, golden-orange, remains at the same angle as before. White snow I view at ground level stretches outward into the beds of the woodlots, another crow flies across the sky's gradient beauty, and the Gloaming stays the way I found it, waiting for the next time I need to escape the madness of a rushing world.