Where Dark and Light Coalesce

The middle-aged hunter finds the dense brown shadows alien and disorienting, as the familiar thick canopy of trees initiates swallowing the late-afternoon sunlight, akin to the dwindling forest population of deer, aurochs, elk, and bears being drawn into the folds of extinction. He feels a pressing need to shift, find a footing in the unfamiliar arena of sprawling mushroom collection like most of his fellow community members.

Seated beneath an oak tree, day-long weary with game-hunting eyes drooping and an unanswerable cry in heart, he palms the soles of his feet and visualizes a quiet evening with his tricenarian wife, having dry bread, baked potatoes, and homemade beer, while others celebrate the Midsummer Festival—lighting bonfires, eating sausages, drinking vodkas, singing songs, and floating candles on the river.

A squirrel scampers around. It tries hard to dislodge a giant seed almost buried in the ground, but it will not budge an inch, much like the hunter and his wife stuck in several fruitless attempts to conceive. Not even the generous physicians’ free consultations and the IVF discounts contribute toward nourishing their already diminishing hope.

He espies a centipede tunneling inside the dirt, making way for the water and nutrients to reach a dormant seed in the earth’s womb, which puffs up, quieting those who prophesy its stale, living world will never burgeon.

Becoming more alert, he lifts his gaze from the forest floor, spots a stork gliding noisily above the back road without trees, clattering its beak, and disappearing into the adjoining copse of trees, swelling within him the traditional belief of bringing babies to homes.

With high-jumping steps, his dark mustache shooting upward, and a line of revealing yellow teeth, he strides across the road. Nearing his house when he finds a stork couple stationed on the roof, and through the growing foliage, as he steps forward in time, he locates his wife relishing tangy gooseberries nestling in their kitchen garden. The warm, comforting aroma of a pie in the oven wafts in the air. His limbs itch to forever abandon his double-barreled shotgun somewhere in the wilderness and take his wife in his arms.