Night in the World by Sharon English

Author:Sharon English
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

• THE LAKE •

18

A SPLASH. A sucking thunk.

In her sleeping bag Gabe stirs and opens her eyes. Faint starlight. The tent walls swelling and relaxing like lungs. She lies listening to the shrill chorus that’s been singing since dusk, wondering what woke her.

Kuh-plunk.

Ah. Yes. The beavers’ nightly spree. They sound like boulders. She imagines them doing belly flops, cannonballing.

Her friends who own the farm warned her they’d make a racket, offered her a space in their bunkie until the cabin was ready. But when she arrived late yesterday, she opted to sleep outdoors. Out here on the edge of the property it’s a kilometre to the house, another quarter to the road. There’s no human noise, not even an electric wire hum. Woods hug the beaver pond on three sides and extend into a county-owned forest. All this — the stars, the noisy darkness — is hers, and there’s nothing solitary about it, not with a host of love-hungry peepers, bleating nightjars and piping whip-poor-wills, plus two rowdy, tail-slapping castorae.

She rolls over, stretches, and lets out a contented grunt. The meadow grass grows so long and thick by the pond that she had to fold and tamp it down like matting before spreading the ground sheet. Even so, the tent more or less floats.

Months of winter, months of ceilings and sealed windows have sprung open like a skin dried and fallen away. Now she wakes under heaven’s vault, along with all the other lives stirring.

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