Stardate 4.26 e 99

As the mild breeze moves over the lay of the land and as the daylight fades, the leaves rustle just enough to announce that they are still there; an other-worldly chirping emanates from the surrounding bushes creating a blanket of sound that sets the stage for the emergence of the distant stars, each guarded by even more numerous distant moons swelling the tides on countless distant planets. A boy in blue jeans waits motionless in a thicket of tall damp grass for the climax of the show.

As the stars brighten and their backdrop blackens, the chirping becomes more rhythmic and begins to feel less oppressive yet more ominous, like the pulsating of some distant, large, ancient, slowly turning motor, as if the shroud of sound has been pulled back and become a tent leaving plenty of space for some yet to arrive presence. Another voice joins the choir. The sound of air rushing to fill a vacuum, the hiss of tires on the highway, slowly increases in volume until it eclipses all other means of perception.

Such a total eclipse, such that all that remains is total blackness and the whoosh, swish, shhhiisssss shadow of sound. All together, all at once, the starts reappear, having called forth enough energy to prick pinholes in the perceptual dome, or has its insulation merely thinned due to the introduction of some other stimulus, that glow just barely noticeable at the edge of the range of vision? The stars seem to continue to brighten, growing larger until they begin to combine and bather everything in a light as bright as day but less yellow, more . . . white.

As each individual star quickly loses its individuality to the heavenly sea of pure light, the vague hue from far away grows in magnitude or at least hastily moves closer. The battle between sight and sound boils, neither quite able to gain the upper hand but each separately increasing in intensity, reaching new levels of unremitting over-stimulation. With shriek, the color of the afterimage following a direct glance at the sun flares overhead. The boy leaps from the thicket and with a single stride clears the horizon in pursuit of the twilit cardinal.