It's Still Life

It Sings at Night

At dusk, on the edge of a pond bordered by palms and deciduous trees that have forgotten how to lose their leaves, a call rises only at night that sounds like a woodpecker at work.

There are, however, no woodpeckers in the forest of Anapoima, Colombia. This is a goatsucker; a nightjar, all silent wings and hungry moon-shaped mouth, and it goes on and on like a wound clock, its sound patient and hollow, as if the trees themselves have learned to knock back.

“It’s a frog,” someone suggests, “No,” another insists, “an owl that’s forgotten how to hoot,” and the night listens politely to these human whispers …and answers only with knocks, with staccato stitches sewing the dark together.

The call returns, an echo with teeth, tapping out a code only the shadows understand: goatsucker, potoo, chupacabra, nightjar —names that cling to opposite sides of the thin line between biology and nightmare.

By morning I know it’s a goatsucker — a myth named, its spell undone, but I keep the memory of that patient, hollow knock.

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “echo”. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.