Window, Table – Nathanael Koah

August 9, 2026

Wood pigeons harp out crucial words to each other. The nest on which the fledglings rest creaks into itself again, hidden somewhere on the shoulder of a tree. Somewhere else a mile away the air is blowing through a cleave of some sort, producing a whistle that is, somehow, communicating something to something else. In its own way it heralds a thing that is large and momentous but ultimately unknown, like the world breathing itself. There, too, a river darkens. And all around it reverberates an air of calm, and a slow-growing temptation, like a sigh that is aware it sighs, a hand moving along a thigh. Things bloom into piles and puddles of many glorious beads, awaiting a face that wishes not to look away. Between them, other things grow, they twirl and they give way and they riddle, and never once repeating. Nevertheless, there is a window, and there is a table. Here, enclosed by the walls, I see them firm in my vision. Both are completely still, but never quiet, never not saying something. If I could stretch out my life so it became a hundred I’d still not be able to recollect what the window has known, all that it’s told. And if I sat and thought about it until time spun I wouldn’t come close to recalling all that the table has held. Its greatest companions are the chairs on its girth, stuck to it like a chain, a belt, a necklace. If for whatever reason we no longer adored it, if one day in a sudden blindness we were even to despise it, its eagerly carved endings with freckles of paint now aged, the etchings and scrapings on its face seen only by a tilted eye, the chipping on the edge that stuck out more and more over time, the detailed mark on its leg that in some light resembles a half moth—well, it would still be there. It would wait for another, its presence planted entirely. And if, seen through the window, a looming fog were to curtail the outside and out of it a gloom were to pronounce the entirety in the shape of the glass, the whole of it now sad and grey, then only a day or two would pass before it would clear and resume its show of colours and things. The table sits hinting at its history. In its body is held the sight of a woodworker, who must have hoped for its life to grow long through seasons and memories. And the window, there in its fixedness, carries with it a face, a figure, and, if seen through some point between light and shadow, a room with a mass of land superimposed like a phantom. Yesterday a rainstorm hit the bordering country, people fled the outside to take cover. The day before that a twig, wrenched from another, fell sideways as the wind blew harsh and fast. A balloon must have got lost in it, one that commemorated someone’s becoming, then burst somewhere in the ether. In a place upwards, people are walking mountains. On the streets cars slash through beckoning howls. Out there people tell each other stories. “I’m sorry,” one cries to another. “I’m sorry too,” the other says back. They crawl through wet grass of backyards, then make their way to other known and unknown places. They sit in cinemas, staring and whirring at projections of light, blue and desiring, the worlds inside of them a bottomless well. They stand in unfamiliar halls, dip their feet into ponds, pluck berries from bushes, point to stars and proclaim things they somehow didn’t know that they knew all along. Some carry generosity in alpine heights, others sad but gracious hums on the way home, through twists in the spine of a night. A night that is dark but still perked in moonlit orbs. A cold night that carries oceans and the neighbouring hillsides where the slopes arch and intersect, along where things grow, along where people wander back to windows, and to tables.