A Ray

The room was dark the way rooms are dark at night, not empty, but filled with silence.

Somewhere in the curtain there was a small hole. It meant nothing in daylight. But now, in the moonlight, it breathed.

A ray.

How strange. The ray did not begin at the curtain. It began halfway, as if it had simply come into being in the middle of the air, without origin, without reason. It ended in a bright white patch on the wall. Clear. Present.

Thin as a thought, white as light that had already traveled so far, from the sun to the moon, from the moon to this curtain, to this hole, to here. A journey of hundreds of millions of miles, ending in a bedroom. In silence. Unnoticed.

Almost unnoticed.

The wall shone. The curtain said nothing.

For a moment there was only that: the patch, the ray, the darkness around it. No explanation. Only something there that should not have been.

Then the thinking began.

How can this be? The light comes from outside. The curtain is the source. But the ray does not begin there. It disappears there. As if the source erases itself.

Perhaps, I thought, a faint glow seeps around the hole into the room. Invisible. A haze. And that haze drowns out the ray precisely where it should be strongest.

The wall appears to be the source. But the wall only receives.

I kept looking for a while. Only because the ray was there. The moonlight, that old, borrowed light, had already come such a long way to be here. In this room. On this wall.

I fell asleep. The ray remained until the morning came.

Stephan Konings