She walked along the verandah and stopped, putting her hand against a wooden column to brace herself, as she looked out at the full moon in the clouded dark of the evening sky over the ocean. The sun had a few hours earlier set and there was only the moonlight and stars to illuminate her surroundings, save an occasional lantern off in the far distance. It was hot and humid, the thickness of the air cut a little by the breezes coming in off the sea, but then that was characteristic of the clime year round even late into the night. Suddenly, the wind picked up just for a moment and she enjoyed the respite of the light flowing air before it calmed back down and returned to its weighted sloth.

She lived alone in a low wooden house by the sea on the island in the tropics. Her house was of the sort common to the island, maybe a little larger than most, but to be sure nothing grandiose and far from unique. The tiled roof formed a peak and hung out with wide eaves over a colonnaded verandah. There were a few areas of the house where the wood was carved with elaborate vegetal shapes and geometric patterns, but mostly it was simple and plain, with whitewashed walls and unadorned round wooden columns. And there at that house she stood on that evening, leaning her body against a column as she looked out at the sea and sky.

She felt something uncanny in the air and an odd juxtaposition of excitement and malaise about the evening overcame her; there was a substrate of strangeness about the night lurking beneath its surface that she couldn’t quite place. Like the night before a festival—or the night before a trial—all at once and impossible to be distinguished; though tomorrow held promise of neither carnival nor tribulation. There would be no sleeping tonight, she thought, and in any case she wasn’t the least bit tired. No, some sense had taken hold of her and compelled her to stay the night here outside in the heavy evening air, waiting for some momentous happening sure to come. Sleep was an irrelevant concern; who could be tired on a night like that? So she waited for she did not know what there on the verandah; she watched the full moon and waited for an indication of the significance that weighed upon the night. Waited for some sign of why it was she was waiting and for what.

She had stood there all night, until dawn was soon to break. All night, beneath the moonlight, she had stood, there in the dark between the wooden columns upon the verandah of her low-set home by the sea. Yet no matter how much time had passed, still the sky remained as black as in its darkest hours. The Sun had not risen. Hours passed, hours passed, the clocks struck 6 then 7 then 8 a.m., 9 a.m., and the sky remained dark as ever. The Sun had not risen. The Sun would not rise.