The Unlit Window

I came down to the kitchen at four because the kettle had been calling me for an hour, in the way kettles call when you have not yet admitted you are awake. The window above the sink was black, except it was not. There was a square of yellow on the sill, and inside the square, a moth was walking. I have lived here eleven years and the bulb in that lamp has been gone for nine.

The moth had no wings I could see. It walked the way someone paces a hallway thinking. I did not want to startle it by turning on a second light, so I stood in the dark and watched, and the kettle, by then, had stopped insisting. I counted thirty steps from one edge of the sill to the other. The moth turned and made the journey again. The light in the lamp, where the bulb is not, did not flicker once.

At a quarter past four I tried the lamp's switch with one finger, the way you check if a stove is on. The switch was cold and the click was the click of something already in its other position. I turned it back. The yellow stayed yellow. The moth continued its hallway. Outside, the foghorn at the point made its low note, the one that sounds less like a warning than like a man clearing his throat before saying something difficult.

I have not written down what happened next, and I am not sure I will. There is a difference between a thing that wants to be on the page and a thing that wants only to be remembered, and I am still learning to tell them apart. The moth, at any rate, is not there now. The light is not there now. The sill is the dull grey of dawn coming up over the bay, and the kettle is full again, and I have made the tea I came down for, and I am sitting at this desk writing to you instead of drinking it.

If you have ever woken before the world and found a small ceremony already underway in your own house, you know what I mean about the difference. If you have not, I cannot explain it any better than this. The kitchen is a kitchen again. The window is a window. Somewhere, a moth I cannot account for is walking a path I cannot account for, in a light that is not there.

I do not know how this ends. I do not think it is meant to.