THE NIGHT BIRD

You might find yourself out for a walk at night. Maybe you can’t sleep, or perhaps you are on your way to or from a late shift, or perhaps you just like to walk at night because the world feels different in the moon and starlight, with few about but you, and that silvery feeling that maybe something is about to happen, something unlike the quotidian drabness of the daylight where despite your hopes nothing much ever does.
One night, something does happen. You feel it, rather than see it at first. There’s a raising of the hairs on your arms and neck, not from fear, but like a storm is coming. The shadowy landscape around has changed, but you can’t say how. Perhaps you dismiss it as an over-active imagination or a lack of sleep or just being a bit weird, as you are sometimes. After a moment or two though, all those explanations fall away.
Everywhere around you, the landscape starts to glow. It’s soft, a gentle blue-white, but it’s everywhere: every tree, every hedge, the telephone poles and the street signs, the bricks in the walls and the tarmac of the road, all shiver with the glow. You look around, startled, and then look down and see that you are aglow too: your feet, your hands, your arms, your legs. You take a surprised breath, and when you exhale you can see that too, glowing like a faint mist as it leaves your lips and fades into the glowing world.
You hear a noise, a soft rustle and flap that seems to come from all corners of the sky at once, and you look up and see the stars, bright in the dark sky, but then the noise gets louder and the sky grows dark as the night bird flies slowly above you, its presence only visible by the stars’ disappearance. They reappear as it passes, but it takes three minutes for the night bird is very, very, very large.
The glow around you fades, and you can see it away from you now, a long glitter path into the distance that gradually turns dark as the night bird flies on.
Then everything is back to normal. All except you, that is. You’ll never quite be the same again, for you’ll know that there are things that cannot be explained away, and you’ll wonder what else there is out there. The answer is, there is quite a lot. Really quite a lot.