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Evening

Thomas steps outside into the cold wetness and looks upwards. The sky has changed from the indistinct white it had been all day to a dark and deepening grey. No clouds or detail, just a color, or a non-color, a sense of the familiar world being closed in by and dissolved into a diffuse, featureless void. He shivers and pulls his jacket closer, beginning to walk down H. Adzymoshka, aware of the muted sound of his heels on the concrete, as if the haze was softly soaking away even the sound of his footsteps. He hears a deep but distant sustained rumble, to his left, in the direction of Prospekt Kirova. Maybe the sound of diesels from a convoy of ORMO BTRs heading out of the city towards the Ukrainian frontier. But nothing moved on the street before him.

It was late February easing into March, but there had been no increase in sun, just this cold, bleak mist, thicker every evening. He thinks of the derivation of that word, ‘evening,’ and finds it appropriate for this strange place. Evening, meaning to make even, to lose with the failing light the ability to discern the character and separateness of different things.

Would it ever be spring again? Or had the sun begun a slow and permanent decay? Will he have to begin to try to trap and conserve an ever-shrinking supply of energy, heat, even light?

And what right does he have to long for a new spring? He’s had his spring, and spent it. But how long in this even darkness, he wonders, will he be able to continue to pretend that the things he can no longer see have any meaning at all?