Eastern Dawn

by Igor Zenin

Somewhere between a horse crossing a meadow and an Orthodox church's gold domes catching the first light through fog, this could be any dawn in the last thousand years — the kind of scene that predates cameras by centuries and doesn't much care that one showed up. Autumn birch leaves frame it like a proscenium arch; the mist does the rest, blurring exactly how far away that church really is. Dawns like this don't wait for anyone with a camera — this one just happened to get caught.