SOUNDS AT NIGHT • by Lavina Blossom

She has been hearing a faint ticking above her. Not regular, only after long pauses. She turns on the lamp beside her, gets out of bed, stands beneath the ceiling fan from which she’s sure the sound originates. It’s not the pull chain tapping metal, yet a sound like that. It must be internal.

It will be hours, she’s sure, before her thoughts will quiet. She opens the bedroom window. Sometimes she hears the hoot of an owl. The last few months, she has not heard the distant answering call from the second owl. Why call if no answer comes? Tonight she doesn’t hear even one. Maybe she needs hearing aids.

What she hears is a cricket rubbing its wings together to signal he’s available to mate. Those owl hoots and cricket chirps relax her, sounds from her childhood on the farm in Michigan, although the owl was rarely heard back then, while the crickets were many and loud, filling warm nights with their yearning.

If crickets yearn. If owls feel loss.

She turns off the light, lies down again, counts her breaths. Her mind does not go blank. She inhales long and slow, exhales with an “Ah” as long as she can stretch it, like Ray’s last breath.

Her mother-in-law was right, a blessing. No more pain.

He once said she was singular when it wasn’t true. Eyes closed, she roots for the lone cricket. His chances may be slim in this dry California heat, yet he works those wings in the dark, perhaps not so much with hope but from instinct, although desire must also be driving that small body as it chirps away with such persistence.


Lavina Blossom grew up in rural Michigan and now lives in Southern California. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poemeleon, Common Ground Review, Gyroscope Review, Book of Matches, 3Elements Review and other publications. Two stories are forthcoming in Okay Donkey.


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