Distant Light

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I have come here to disappear, in this desolate and abandoned village where I’m the sole inhabitant.

The sun has just gone down behind the ridge. The light is fading. At this moment I’m sitting a few yards from my small house, before a steep wooded drop. I’m watching the world about to be engulfed by the darkness. My body is perfectly still, on a metal chair whose legs are sinking lower and lower into the ground, yet every so often I catch my breath, as though I’m on a swing with ropes fixed to a point infinitely far away in the universe.

The sky is crossed by the last swallows that fly here and there like arrows. They swoop past my head, plunging headfirst into massive spheres of insects suspended between sky and earth. I feel the gust of their wings on my temples. Before me I see distinctly the black body of a larger and fleshier insect as it disappears into the mouth of a swallow that was chasing it with beak wide open, screeching. Such is the silence that I can even hear the clang of its body in continued suffering being crunched and dismembered inside the body of the other animal as it swoops up rapturous into the sky.

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