Bracey's Cove

It’s just after sundown, and cold. The sky is perfectly clear, the air crystalline.
The tide is running out, and below the pebble beach the waves come lapping in, darkening the long sloping granite ledges. Sutton’s Island is a dim outline in the dusk. Close offshore, half a dozen ducks are rafting together for the night. It doesn’t look very comfortable or warm out there – it’s just below freezing – but the ducks, silhouetted against the pale water, form a ragged, close line, and rock peacefully as the waves follow each other in.
On the western side of the cove it’s sunset, all reds and fiery hues. Out at the point, the water meets a line of firs, densely black against the rose-colored sky. The sky is fiere and brilliant along the treetops, fading upward to paler hues. The water below it is glimmering red, softening to pink toward the east. The sky and water here are awash with sunset. They’ve been taken over by it, flooded by the great roseate streams of light.
On the eastern side of the cove, it’s night. The water here is silky black, and the entire curtain of sky has turned a deep endless mauve-gray. Halfway up the sky is half a moon, brilliant and huge. It’s never been so huge. It’s enormous, and radiant with a cold white light. Sometimes half a moon looks like its own shape, a sickle, or a crescent, but this like a full moon cut in half, a demisphere. The absent, darkened side of it is mysteriously present, felt, though not visible. Half of it’s lit up as though with a spotlight. All the markings are visible, and bold: there are the craters and mountains that we’ve always known, the lakes and valleys, all the mysterious lunar runes that have been in our nighttime minds for a million years.
Below this bright presence, on the black water, lies its rippling reflection, brilliant points of light, incandescent. A blanket of gleaming scintillae, rocking like the ducks on the lowering tide.
Strange that all of it – the rose-colored streams of light on the waves, the flaming sky behind the firs, the shocking cold brilliance of the half-moon, the glittering net on the inky water below – all of this is radiance borrowed from the vanished sun, which has gone, which has sunk soundlessly below the horizon, which has disappeared beyond the edge of the known world.