Night fell out on the big road, a thousand trucks lit like Christmas trees, 80 miles-per-hour stars in the sudden dusk, stars streaming west, following the contours of the land, west wind to a dying sun. This Osage land is where upland plateau — all rocks and hollers and ridges — meets prairie, bleak and hopeful. The landscape is ancient, black silhouette of a tree line immortal, Osage oranges ancient and twisted. The landscape is modern, full of truck stops and billboards, exhorting us to a common age. Westward against the dark, the sky turns brilliant, crimson, bloodied day end in the hovering ether.
In-between spaces are dark and magical things. The in-between of mountain rock and prairie grass, the in-between of fall and winter, day and night. Suspended in space, there is old magic in the in-between, easy enough to overlook. Twenty-four hour lights fool the mind, much like keeping the barn light on will fool a bleary-eyed chicken who could wander long beneath a false forever star. Dusk, twilight, the sun slipping beyond the horizon and the world plunging darker, the moment forever regarded as potent, is now easy to neglect.
Modern purveyors of magic oft-take the approach that magic is what we make of it. If "it" resonates with you, then just go with it. Meandering consumerism at its finest makes us again the center of the known universe. "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it," goes the inane philosophy, "does it make a sound?" Only the pointless navel-gazers of the 20th century would pause over such a stupid question. Of course the tree would make a sound! Human beings are not that important. Lost in our own hubris, we forget the trees are there to listen as well.
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch," roars C. S. Lewis' Aslan, "[for] I was there when it was written." Suspended in space, the old wooden bridge over the Spring River guarded the cold, dark waters for generations, bridge suspended at midnight between all six compass points. Phantom horses ran on that bridge once, it was said, and Little People were seen abroad beneath the moon. Turn three times 'round as the clock strikes twelve to summon the devil. Go ahead, ask him for a favor in return for a soul. In-betweens are hard things, especially as the eventide sky turns orange, deep, fiery heart of creation smoking out.
The smoke of the night fills the air hazy, swirling around the vintage neon, around the arabesques of the Spanish Mission Fantasy, a movie palace on the edge of the Wild West, not far from the river, not far from the ragged dark hollers. Someone just burning leaves, nothing more, but there is mystery in the night, ghosts peering from behind old barber shop windows. The scrappy elms shiver, losing leaves quickly now in the cold damp. The leaves are crumpled on broken sidewalk. A shedding from the old, a new thing is dying into the winter's rebirth, rebirth the color of rich, deep soil, the color of night, the color of shadow. Hope is lost behind the eastern horizon, but not forever lost, hope crisp as a cold spring frost. In a twinkling, the sky is black.
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