The boards under the chair give a small sound as you settle, the kind of sound old pine makes when it has spent all day in the sun and is letting that heat back into the air. The lamp above the door is already lit, a yellow bulb inside a glass shade clouded by years of summer. One moth circles it in long oval passes. The air smells faintly of hay from the field beyond the fence, a dry sweetness that has been gathering since morning. Somewhere at the far end of the dust road a dog barks once and stops. The crickets in the grass keep on with their steady rasp, a sound so even it seems to belong to the ground rather than to anything living in it.
The chair is a plain ladderback with a rush seat gone soft from use. Your hand rests on the arm where the varnish has worn through to bare wood, and the wood there is cooler than the rest, smoother, shaped to the press of palms. The porch runs the width of the house and then some, wide enough for two chairs and a low table and still room to walk past. The floorboards are painted grey, though the paint has thinned along the line where the screen door swings, and you can see the grain underneath. A few pale moths have gathered on the ceiling near the lamp, keeping still, their wings folded into neat triangles. The one at the bulb keeps circling. Its shadow passes across the boards at your feet and back again.
Past the porch rail the yard falls away into tall grass. The grass is the colour of straw at the tops and still green near the roots, and it moves a little even when there is no wind, which means there is wind, just not enough to feel. Beyond the grass the field begins, and beyond the field a line of hedgerow darker than the sky. The sky itself has not gone fully to night. It holds a band of green above the hedgerow that deepens to blue and then to the first dark overhead, where two stars have already come through. A bat cuts across the lamp-glow and is gone before you can follow it. The crickets do not pause. A second bat follows the first, lower this time, skimming the grass, and then the air is still again except for the small dry ticking of insects in the boards.
The sound of the place has layers. Closest is the chair, the faint creak when you shift your weight, the whisper of cloth against rush. Then the moth at the lamp, its wings making a soft irregular tap against the glass whenever it comes in too close. Then the crickets, which you stop hearing for long stretches and then hear again all at once, as if they have grown louder, though they have only grown more noticed. Farther out, a whippoorwill begins somewhere in the hedgerow, three notes repeated, the middle one rising. It calls for a while and then goes quiet, and in the quiet you can make out the low rush of the cottonwoods at the edge of the field, leaves turning their pale undersides in a breath of air you cannot feel from here. A screen door on another house, far off, opens and shuts. A voice says something short. A pause. Then nothing.
Under your hand the wood of the chair arm has the day's warmth still in it. You move your fingers along the edge and find a small ridge where the grain stands up, and further along a place where a nail has been set below the surface and the wood filled in around it and painted over and the paint worn off again. The rail in front of you has the same quality, warm on top where the sun reached it longest, cooler underneath. A cup sits on the low table, an enamel mug with a chipped lip, half full of water gone to the temperature of the evening. When you lift it the metal gives a dull small sound against the wood. The water tastes of the well, faintly mineral, cold still at its centre though the outside of the mug is not cold. You set it down in the ring of damp it has already left on the table.
The smell of hay comes and goes. It is strongest when the air moves a little, and at those times a second smell comes with it, the fine pale dust of the road. The road runs past the gate and out between the fields, pale even in this light, and you can follow it with your eyes for some distance before it bends behind a stand of oaks. Somewhere along it, earlier in the day, a truck went by and lifted the dust, and the dust is still settling. Under these smells is the green damp smell of the grass itself, released by the cooling, and under that the faint resinous note of the porch boards, pine that has held heat all summer and is giving it back slowly now that the sun is gone. A moth-wing brushes your wrist, so light you are not sure it happened, and when you look there is nothing there.
The whippoorwill starts up again, closer this time, or maybe only clearer. Three notes. A pause the length of a slow breath. Three notes. The crickets fill the pauses. A little way off, in the grass, something small moves, a quick rustle and then stillness, and then the rustle again a few feet on. A field mouse, probably, working its way along the line of the fence. Further out, in the hay field, the sound of insects thickens into one long note held without breathing. The cottonwoods shift once more. A pickup passes on a road you cannot see, its engine a distant hum that rises and falls away and is gone, and the quiet that comes after it is deeper than the quiet before, as if the sound had pushed something aside and the night is taking its time coming back together.
The lamp makes its small yellow circle on the boards. Inside the circle the moth's shadow still passes, slower now, or no slower, only it seems so. Outside the circle the porch goes to grey and then to the darker grey of the yard and then to the black shape of the hedgerow against a sky that has turned fully to night. More stars have come. They do not arrive so much as become visible, one by one, as the blue drains off. The band above the hedgerow is gone. A single satellite moves steadily across the high dark, not blinking, and then passes behind the eave of the porch and is lost. The wood of the chair has cooled a little. The rush seat holds the shape of you. Your feet rest flat on the boards and the boards are still warm through the thin soles.
You could stay. The chair allows it. The lamp will burn as long as it burns. The moth will circle or settle. The crickets will go on, and the whippoorwill will go on, and the grass will go on with its slow small movements in air that barely moves. The dust on the road has almost finished settling. The mug on the table has gone to room temperature, which is now the temperature of the night, which is cooler than it was an hour ago by some amount you could not name. A breath of air comes across the porch, carrying hay and the faintest trace of woodsmoke from a house too far to see. It passes and is followed by stillness. The whippoorwill calls once more and does not call again. The moth at the lamp slows, tips against the glass, rights itself, and begins another oval. The light on the boards yellows a little as the bulb settles into its long quiet burning, and the shadows at the edge of the porch draw in closer, and the field beyond the rail goes on with its long low sound, and the night holds, and holds, and