Come Now Desolation
The Salted Orchard Part VII (Read Part VI here .) Dawn had come and lit up the Captain’s old world, and what had been born in Cusack’s imagination and first encountered in silvered outlines cast by the clear half-moon and the moon’s shattered lightning on the river became simultaneously more and less alive. Color moved in, and detail, and now came the roofs of houses and then fences and animals behind the fences, still unconscious, or rising clumsily up on four legs as though surprised by and unready for the return of the world. Bibury disappeared then in the spreading daylight. It became replaced with this hamlet, fine and English and as good as any, but not what it was, and Cusack felt the momentary void between his letting old Bibury go and discovering this new one, fresh and still in the minutes after dawn, and lacking people. He had slowed his horse to an easy walk upon approaching the hamlet, and this the horse took as its opportunity to communicate its exhaustion. It moved unste