Night

I shut the front door behind me, place the key into the lock, turn it, and hear the click of the mechanism. The deadbolt has now killed ungranted entrance.

Winter temperatures. The trees are in full prime fall colors. Leaves skitter along the front lawn and sidewalks.

No clouds in the sky; the moon is below the horizon.

Orion’s Belt glimmers in the sky just above my head. For city stars, they are prolific in their brightness.

A bad night’s sleep awoke me—nightmares. I was running a marathon but didn’t finish before the time cutoff. It was eight hours in my dream. Duluth roads stretch across the shore of Lake Superior. Calm, small ripples on the blue plane.

The stars stare right back at me. Why do I worry so? The sky forces perspective on the small motions of Earth. I shouldn’t compare myself to anything here—only to the indifference of the universe

The belt of stars greets me. I say greetings in return in my mind. The stars can read minds. I go on my way; they go on theirs.

I don’t have the fuel tank to burn an oil lamp to shoot protons back out into space. If I did, I would think that some life form millions of light-years away would see the faint, dim ball of shimmering flame and say, “Hey, that feels familiar.”

The life form—hopefully more than a single cell basking for photosynthesis—would look up at their sky and admire the long-forgotten burning of the soil lamp.

The lamp that burned bright, and only for a short time, against the infinity of time itself.

I am yet a speck of dust underneath a bed’s wooden frame in a forgotten mansion. The only life remaining in the mansion are the occasional rodent family and a plethora of bug species.

What is a man to do?

Do I go hunting, to spear large sperm whales gliding on the surface of salty water, just to take its life and drain the carcass for the oil that needs to fill my lamp?

The abandoned mansion used to house a wealthy and happy family. Butlers cleaned the halls with feather dusters, and maids watched the children in the nursery grow.

The trim work was incredible. That was the only thing the family liked about the mansion.

No dust was to be found underneath the mother’s and father’s wooden bed frame. It was the type of bed frame that had four poles extending vertically to create a roof platform that covered the surface of the bedding below. Curtains were attached and tied up in the morning as the maids made the bed.

A few specks of dust fell from the movement of fabric and found themselves underneath the bed. Airflow was limited on the floor; they did not move around.

A tragic event happened that afternoon as the family, all packed from the night before, loaded their bags into the V12 Bentley outside their brick-laid driveway, beyond the massive, thick wooden doors made from chopped-down redwoods.

The family never came home after their departure. The maids and butlers were fired by the estate manager who took over the land and mansion after the untimely deaths.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, months into years. Dust from the decaying curtains and bedding began to find its way underneath the wooden frame.

The windows were boarded up; no light ever reached the room. The dust specks began to clump together to combat loneliness in the night.

Maybe one day someone would clean and throw the dust into the wastebasket.

As mice with long, skinny tails scurried by, the dust clumps would move like a tumbleweed rolling across the dirt road on the main street of an old western town.

Where would it go?

Where would the breeze take it?

1/21/2026