Gods and Goddesses

The marsh at dusk is all sound and no shape. Reeds knock softly against one another. The water lies flat and dark between them, holding the last of the light in long copper bars. Out past the papyrus a bird cries, thin and rising, a sound very close to the keening of a woman, and...

Evening comes down over a wide field, and the grass holds the last of the light a little longer than the sky does. At the far edge stands a hall. Long, low, gold at the window-slits, smoke going up straight in the still air. The door is open the way a door is open when...

There is a lake in the north of Wales that lies long and dark between the hills. Llyn Tegid, in Welsh. Bala, on most English maps. In the early hours the water holds the mountains upside down, and the reeds along its edge stand so still they seem to be listening for something. Somewhere on...

The room is dark but for one flame. Outside, the street has emptied in the way streets empty after midnight, and the window glass holds a thin skin of cold. Inside, the candle leans, steadies, and burns straight again. You have something to say. You are not certain how to say it. That is the...

There is an hour in most houses when the rooms finally go still. The kettle has cooled. The traffic outside has thinned to one car every few minutes. A floorboard settles somewhere behind you, the way old wood does when the heating goes off. In that hour, a shelf with a single candle on it...

The saucer sits on the shelf at the hour when the window stops being glass and becomes a mirror. A little milk. Three oats. A crust of bread torn rather than cut. Nobody comes for it. The milk skins over before morning, the oats swell and soften, the crust goes brittle at one edge where...

There is an hour, usually late, when the house has settled and the candle has burned down to a small blue root of flame. That is often when the question arrives. Not a question about tools or timing. A question about whether something stands on the other side of the dark, and whether it knows...

There is a lake in the Alban Hills that the Romans called the mirror of Diana. It lies in the throat of a dead crater, dark and almost round, and the wooded slopes lean so close above the shore that the water carries the trees upside down through the whole white afternoon. At dusk the...

There is an hour in the wood when the light turns the colour of wet bark and the path ahead stops being certain. Something shifts at the edge of the bracken. Not quickly. It has no reason to hurry. You do not see the animal first. You see the shape above it, the branching crown...

There is a ford where the river runs shallow, and the stones beneath the water are the colour of old iron. A woman kneels at the edge of it. She is washing something in the current, lifting and lowering a length of linen, and the linen is dark with more than river silt. It will...

The first day of February comes in the dark, and the cold has not yet broken. The ground outside is iron. The thorn hedge stands bare and black against a sky the colour of wet ash. Yet somewhere beneath the frost the sap has turned, and the ewes are heavy, and there is milk in...

Three roads meet somewhere near where you live. A lane splitting from a lane. A pavement forking around a wall. A gravel track that gives up at the edge of a field and lets two footpaths carry on without it. At noon such a place is nothing at all. It is a corner. It is...

The shop is warm and smells of resin. Bundles of dried leaf lie tied with twine in a wicker basket beside the till. Small printed cards lean against the candles, bearing names of gods from a dozen countries and a dozen centuries, shelved together like spices in a rack. Everything here carries a price. Nothing...

Two candles stand at the back of the table, one pale as milk, one the green of wet moss. Between them sits a shallow dish of salt, a sprig of something dried past recognition, and the low animal smell of wax that has been lit and cooled and lit again. Ask whose altar this is,...