0500

At 5 AM, when I’ve been up all night, a wind sometimes rushes through the garden and sets branches and stalks rustling against each other. Sometimes I’ll be wandering through the house when this happens and I’ll stop in front of a window and watch them undulate. Sometimes the moon is just a fingernail in the sky but even then it is potent, a stain leaking from its pockmarks down to the earth. It dyes the trees, the roofs, the stone figurines in the garden; it paints all terrestrial things midnight blue and ivory. Sometimes I’ll lean out of the window and peer up at the pale tree limbs, rippling and muttering in the wind. Sometimes when I do this I can see other worlds; worlds bathed in livid light and filled with cold winds that rouse the locals, a species of pallid, lanky invertebrates. They wake and stir and touch each other with stiff limbs, murmuring in a language made only of rasps. Sometimes I think I have an inkling of what their murmurs might mean, but the feeling wanes as the moon fades and the wind dies. Still, sometimes I return to my bed feeling both minute and superhuman, having seen something that perhaps no others have, something that even I may never witness again.

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Miriam Alexander-Kumaradoss grew up between three states in South India and now lives in New York. She is completing an MFA at Columbia University. Her fiction has appeared in The Molotov Cocktail and Apogee Journal and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She writes about odd people and creatures that may or may not exist.

Lead image: “new year’s moon” (via Flickr user Robert Couse-Baker)