1The shadows are heavy. I don't know what makes them this way, but they're so much heavier at three in the morning than they are at one in the afternoon. They're so much more present, because everything's a shadow. The streetlights cast frothy layers of shadow upon shadow - the lacy darkness cast by webbed branches, the thick blocks of black thrown out onto the street by mailboxes and cars and sheds, the thin, blue dark of corners and moonlit sidewalk.
The sky is blurry with the grey-black-blue of fog and cloud. The stars don't have the power to shine through the thick veil of a summer night's moisture, but the moon glows obscurely. A white, glowing orb with no edges; only a moment of bright white, surrounded and consumed on every side by a blue-gray mass of cloudiness.
There are noises. And there is movement. Small animals of the night bustle around me. A bird screeches in the distance and I wonder why it is awake. The sun does not rise for another three hours. Small rabbits hop around the street timidly. They scamper and they hurry, and I try to make myself as still as possible - see how close one will get to me.
I am statuesque, my shadows reaching around me on all sides. I sit in the center of a stadium of streetlights, a cul-de-sac sidewalk rounding about me like a sinister, curving snake. I haven't moved in fifteen minutes. I haven't needed to. The summer night's air surrounds me like bandaging, and I am mummified into this place, this spot in the center of the street, in the center of the night, as cold pavement presses small indentations into the bare skin of my thighs.
Wrapped around me is the heavy, winter coat that I bought to take to Boston with me when I move. I have two weeks, two days, and ten hours left in California, and I thank god for that. However, I know that this soft, balmy night air will not exist much longer, and I can not waste it.
A rabbit approaches me, and the sides of my painted lips perk up in a crooked smile. He is only seven feet away. Five feet, and his nose twitches, his white, wispy whiskers rotate and jerk and settle in the stillness. A breath is released from my body and escapes into the night air silently.
And then I hear it.
A motor in the distance, like a ghost on the wind in a neighborhood far away, wailing and screeching around through streets and chimneys. And like that, the rabbit is gone, scurrying away into the darkness, its body covered and engulfed by shadow, so that he becomes only another layer in the night's shroud.
The beat up, grey-gold Toyota Camry doesn't appear around the corner until well after the headlights have filled the dark spaces with an intruding bright yellow light. The stillness is gone, and I stand up where I am, and stay there. The coat ends below the hem of my shorts and I realize that I must look terrifying. In a frantic moment, I unzip my jacket and separate it in the middle to show him that I'm dressed in something cute, something normal for the middle of a summer night.
The unzipping did no good. I was still in the center of the cul-de-sac, surrounded by lights in the nighttime, alone and wrapped in a coat, when the Camry rounded the corner. Jerkily, it halted. I caught him off-guard. Probably gave him a heart attack.
It was like walking down a dirt road in the middle of the day, in the shade of thick, flailing trees, and almost stepping on a small, innocent-looking animal, and suddenly fearing it, looking past the facade and into everything you know about dangerous wildlife, and feeling some horrible suspicion as you try to step over the thing. That was how his car approached me. I waved nervously, a small, timid movement that felt, at best, creepy.
The car drove slowly up, straight on towards me, inching forward sluggishly. It stopped about five feet from me, and I smiled crookedly. I hoped I looked cute. I hoped he thought I was cute. I always hoped that. I leaned to the side slightly, hoping that the way my hair fell away from my face and my teeth bit my bottom lip flirtatiously was cute.
A flash of red hair leaned out the window.
"Da fuck you doin' in the middle of the street?" He called to me, too loudly. I held my finger up to my lip and hushed him, looking quickly behind me to my house, to make sure no lights turned on. The headlights were bright against my garage door, but the darkness of the upstairs window was still and unsullied. "You gettin' in?" His voice was only half a notch quieter. It disturbed the night.
I did not answer, I only rounded the side of his car, opened the door, sat down, bunching my coat to either side of my legs, and closed the door. The seatbelt moved on its own, from one side of the top of the doorframe to the other, strapping me in. It was a feature that I could tell was meant to be revolutionary when it was released, but no one ever caught on. It has been wasted on old cars filled with drugs and booze and used, stolen coffee mugs.
"Cute coat," he said, and peeled out of the cul-de-sac.
A sudden bu-bump of the car jolted me, and when I looked behind us, there was the sad, squirmy, squashed body of a bunny, its small shadow thick and inky underneath the bright light of the streetlamp.