The last shadow left quietly, almost without personality, flickering as it left like a movement from a horse at the far end of a paddock caught in the corner of your eye, far away under the gigantic pine trees that ring the property, trees so old now that their limbs are tearing loose from their trunks and collapsing hundreds of feet at a time, tearing away at the tree itself as they fall. Those fallen branches are images of sound. Above is a sky that the trees can never fill, though with all their vegetable guile they try to fill that sky with pine. The horse will come up despite all this and stand in the dusk in the paddock, like the beginning of something.