Gloaming

When I finished the Muriel Spark book just before half past 11,
 I felt full of trembling promise, excitement. Heady with balmy.
Lying in bed beside the piercing cries of unfamiliar night birds,
one like the creak of a swing, back and forth.
Confused with images from the book, still, those characters marooned
on an island like this one, growing desperation, fierceness, bloodiness,
everything blooming in a tropical sky...

The windows here have no glass, but shutters full of wooden slats
that you can close against mosquitoes in the dusk.
Mostly decorative though, I supposed,
as we saw them flying inside, and woke in the mornings covered in red welts.

It's so strange and jarring and childlike, opening shutters right into air.
Like we're just playing at this living. I suppose we are-
holidays are make-believe.

Indiana closes all of the pretend doors before we sleep.
Even though the woman told us everyone here lives with their houses wide open.

Indiana slants their slats till flat and carefully slides the hanging hook in
to keep them there.
He nudges a door with his foot just so, but it bulges over the threshold.

"This is no good, really," he says.
"The woman said to just leave them open. I think that's really what they do here."
"Yes," he says. "It's no good for my fear of strangers breaking in to kill us."
(I didn't know we shared this fear.
I wondered if I'd accidentally passed it on to him, ptsd-by-proxy
after years of me jabbering anxiously about it at night.)

But of course, he went straight to sleep anyway, right on top
of his book, even, and when I moved us
into the bedroom, he went right back into it, barely stirring at me observing
that the bedroom door could not be locked from the inside.