Spectators

He could tell, in the dark, how high the trees went. They whispered. They went so high that he would probably die if he walked off of one of their lowest branches. All that noise above him was directly connected to the trunks that were next to him, and thicker than he was tall, but at the same time did not care about their conversation.

He could almost directly see, now, the lights of the house that glowed in the blackness. Though he was far away, he knew this glow came from lights that were inside of rooms, turned on or off by someone only needing them to see if they’d left something on the couch, or to read words off a paper in their hands. Closer and closer, he went along in the cold, until he saw the roof of a house, outlined at first by its own sourceless…