The patch of sun

Some time in the afternoon a rectangle of sun lies on the floor. It has come in low through the window and across the boards, and it is the one warm thing in the room, and it is not doing anything. There is nothing to explain about it. The sun is out, the window is there, the light falls where the geometry says it must — a child could tell you why, and no one would ever bother to, because there is no turn in it, no folk story to correct, nothing hidden that opening it up would reveal. It is just the plainest fact in the house, lying on the floor, warm. I want to look at it anyway.

You cannot catch it moving. This is the first strange thing, and you have to sit with it a while to feel how strange. It is the size of a doormat and it is crossing the room, and there is no moment at which it moves. You look down and its near edge is along the third board from the rug; you read, or you don't even read, you just sit; you look down again and the edge is on the fourth board and has climbed the leg of the chair, and in between there was nothing to see. The minute hand of a clock does the same, but you know the minute hand is cheating, that it jumps when you aren't looking. The sun does not jump. It is genuinely, continuously moving, faster than a snail, over ground you are staring straight at, and it will not let you watch it happen. You could put a coin at its edge and come back and the coin would be in the cold, and you would still not have seen the light leave it.

Inside the rectangle everything is more itself. The grain of the floorboard stands up in it, every scratch and nail-hole thrown into a long raking shadow it never has in the flat light of the rest of the room. The dust hangs in the shaft above it, turning — not falling, turning, drifting up as often as down, riding the slow heat coming off the warmed wood, and you only ever see it in this one slant of light and nowhere else, though it is everywhere in the room, in your throat, all the time. Put your hand down into the patch and the back of it goes warm at once, a particular close warmth that has come ninety million miles and through a pane of glass and stopped, here, on your skin. Whatever is the reddest thing in the room is redder where the sun has found it. Colours keep their promises inside the rectangle. Outside it they are only getting by.

Everything that can, comes to it. A cat will cross a whole house and fold itself down into the exact shape of the light and sleep there, and follow it as it goes, getting up mid-afternoon to move eighteen inches west without ever fully waking. A dog leans into it. A person reading in a cold room shifts the chair a hand's width, not deciding to, and is in the sun, and the shoulders come down. Nobody is persuaded into this. It is older than persuading. The warm patch on the floor is the same warm patch a lizard climbs onto in the morning and the same one a whole animal will drive a hundred miles toward the sea to lie in, and in your front room it asks nothing and means nothing and everything alive in the house drifts to it through the afternoon like filings to the one magnet.

And then it leaves. Late on it stops crawling flat and begins to climb — up off the floor and onto the skirting board, up the wall, and as it climbs it narrows and stretches and goes from white to butter to a deep low orange, a tall thin blade of light laid up the wallpaper, and then it is a line along the very top of the wall, and then it is on the ceiling, small, and then there is no patch at all and the room is full of evening and you did not see that happen either. It was on the floor, warm, all afternoon. You will get another one tomorrow, at the same hour, on the same board, and you will not watch that one either, and that is exactly right. It doesn't have to be watched. It is only the sun, come in through the window, lying on the floor of the room you happen to be alive in. I wanted it on the shelf.