The warm summer evening lays heavy on the town, on the main street crowded with lamplight and cars and chattering people, on the houses where fans whirr and curtains riffle, on windows full or empty of life, on tops of trees and the roots of lawns, on a front porch where a man rocks gently, the creak of porch boards stuttering against the half-darkness, clink of ice in his glass of lemonade. The humid air hums with lilacs. A thrum of life slips out with half-heard music or the late slap of feet up steps or two people walking in clinging shadow. He lifts the glass to his lips; the ice falls forward, then back, and the porch boards resume their easy mutterings.
Finally, the sounds wane. He goes inside, does not turn on a light. He can feel it now and he is propelled through the house, his hands running along walls, reading the blackness. He traverses the house until he sits at his desk in the bedroom, looking calmly at the elm outside his window framed by the moon. He can feel it now and his mind opens to the images of people he has seen and talked to and laughed with and cried for and above all not understood. Their private musings and despairs wash through him until he is full of their smells and privations and yearnings. It is like staring at a mirror in the dark, he thinks, it is like trying to squeeze air. As he sits, the shadows of the elm's leaves etch like words across the unfurled moonlight on his desk.