Nocturnal
Laura Bylenok
After Teresita Fernández’s Nocturnal (Horizon Line), 2010, solid graphite on panel
I stepped into the infrared and saw night headless. Lambless. Worse. Uncocked, not drunk. The floodlight I flicked on administered its anodyne. Out here the fields a sea chopped up, a grid. In one square the dog where the neighbor left him unchained asleep under the wall. In one square the neighbor who came by the house and asked for the gun to kill the dog. Said no use keeping a dog like that. Said no. Dog ate the night. Dog ate the lamb yielding like the night its opened belly. The work was hard. Taking the skin and putting it on. Thick neck not yet closing over my own. The night a paradox of softness. Night carbon, unsketchable, burned as bone. It took all night to cock the gun and I said no. I wanted to go in before night rising rid me of my dead. Before night graphite in it thinned and hid its myriad: its gray of white and red. A grid. A wire sliced and night just stood there in the floodlight. The neighbor hung the dog instead. Three days and then the local boys cut the body off the head and burned it. I gathered up the bones from a muzzle of ash: a singularity of carbon in a thick black bag.