Midnight in Trabuco Canyon

Posted on June 23, 2003 in Book of Days Neighborhood

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about an hour of the day.

Lynn has gone to bed, so it’s just the four of us: Virginia Mew, Boadicea, Fiona Phosphor, and me. The kittens roll and tap the floor until their peregrinations bring them to a sleeping place. I don’t know all the places they hide. A silence ensues for two to five hours when the energies they’ve zapped through their legs get reworked into uric acid and their red blood cells take the wastes of each cell to the kidneys for flushing out. Virginia sleeps on one of the kitchen table chairs, curled up; a licorice donut on a vanilla serving tray. The night outside is as anthracite as her fur.

One by one, I lose my companions. I play computer games, read, comment on weblogs, and write.

Now is the hour when I hear every click in the whirr of the fan, when transcontinental jet thunder faintly fogs my ears, and when insects butt their heads against the lights. With one ear towards the mountains and the other towards the sheeming* metropolis, I hear both the wild and the dog-collared, the silence in which I can hear the crack of the growing greasewood and the other where the whisk of car tires snaking through a neighborhood that is maybe a couple of miles away, figures. The distant becomes important: I’m free of clanging in my ears, the deafness of the wakeful world.

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* sheeming: a new word. Means “to buzz faintly, like a flourescent light”.

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Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: This is what you can see by starlight.