Dusk in the Riverbed

The light, pastel and yellow, streams in from the Neverland Ranch hills, invading the dark elegance of the riverbed under the bridge. The sun slowly sinks below the hill, and the light becomes thicker, denser, as it sets. Simultaneously, the orange and pink rays tickle my skin; soft fingertips grazing my arms and face. But even as they warm my skin with a gentle touch, they also thicken the air, as if they are somehow heavier than the normal rays that beat down on me during the day. Perhaps that's why people notice the sun when it’s setting, rather than when it’s arcing across the sky during the day, because the light is different, somehow thicker. The denser light calms my heart beat, and I begin to feel like I’m moving through syrup. I begin to notice more. The chorus of birds screaming their songs from fence posts. The competing orchestra of crickets, chirping through the chilled air. The sounds fade into one another, as the sunlight blends into the shadow of twilight. 

The riverbed is strewn with sticks, fallen soldiers in a battle lost against the donkeys that roam through here. They lie at odd angles, kicked and trampled in hours past. Mulefat and mugwort plants lean over the remnants, curiously inspecting the battleground. Their backs arch sadly, mourning the loss of their friends. 

The sky, framed by the bridge, is a depthless abyss. The clouds are mere wisps on the horizon, and the stars have not yet twinkled into existence. Without a frame of reference, the empty canvas above begs for me to paint something on it. It begs for a smudge like a cloud or a dot like a star, anything to give the emptiness a splotch of context. I get lost, swallowed up by the blue, longing for some cosmic paintbrush to smear a message across the sky. The sky eats me whole, taking me past the bridge and into the void. 

A mouse rustles the grass behind me, startling me out of my trance, out of my journey into the darkening sky. It looks at me. We make eye contact. I can see its chest beating rapidly, its heart pumping like a little motor. Then it pounces away into the brush. I will never see it again. Something was shared in that moment of eye contact. That mouse knew something, perhaps something about the sunset, or the fallen sticks, or the endless void above us. Perhaps it sees these twilight wonders everyday, when I am too busy to pause and watch it. That mouse, its body framed against the dirt behind it, gave me a little piece of its rapid heart beat. A piece of what it knew about the riverbed, what it sees every sunset. I ponder that moment of connection as the light fades to darkness. I get up, brush the dirt and foxtails off of my thighs, and walk away from the riverbed under the bridge, away from the twilight scene.