The cat had been sleeping in the doghouse. The day was like a cave after a lightning. Birth and death played on a see- saw and sight and night played hide and seek. Time had left no tracks. The ground always seemed to be a step ahead. The very air turned nocturne.
Trees dreamed of fires at the bottom of a drowned sea, where echoes still repeated a wave’s last yelp for help: the sunken sea the sun can see.
A moth had died between two panes of glass, dreaming of being still and light aflutter round it. And the panes dreamed of being landscape and living room at once. Alas.
The sun persisted amid stars. But the light was narrow as an arrowslit. The sun was not eclipsed – the day itself felt faint. Brightness graded into dark.
The sun and I stared at each other, but seeing felt like blindness.
Vyatcheslav Bart was born on December 2, 1983, in Kokshetau, Kazakhstan. In 1994 he immigrated to Israel. He is studying for an MA in English Literature at Tel Aviv University.