Night Songs

Начало книги

Dawn. Silent.

The narrow country road had a wet, ebony sheen, giving it depth, like water under ice, unmoving and cold. It was worn, in small patches, to the graveled bed beneath, and was shouldered by a faintly orange mixture of earth, sand, and smooth round pebbles. Shallow drainage ditches flanked it, seeming higher than the road because of brittle brown weeds that rose above the surface like clusters of huddled old men waiting to be toppled.

On both sides was a state-preserved woodland-stunted cedars and homely scrub pines, bare-limbed oaks with thick rough boles gone gray as the weather, an occasional red maple, ghostly white birches solitary and in cages. The ground was littered in tan and sable, dead leaves and dead needles thoroughly sodden from two days' rain, more mud than mulch and unruffled by the wind. Red-thorn thickets wound darkly through the gloom. Nests in high branches sat deserted and bedraggled.

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