Everywhere.
“My garden!” I gasped aloud. The garden I had loved tirelessly. My life’s work, now nothing more than sloppy mud.
The storm had been treacherous, a savage beast.
Behind me, houses were slipping from their foundations, maybe even mine.
I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop looking at the mud.
It oozed into his ears and he tasted bitter earth against his tongue. Embraced in its cool comfort he was no longer afraid. It was comfortable here in the slurry.
He felt an explosion nearby and some blood splattered across him.
Warm bodies cooled in the slick earth.
In slow jerking motions the slack was taken in until it became a taut line from my harness to the edge of the crevasse where it disappeared down into the swirling snow.
My heart thumped violently - she was alive.
I fumbled for my knife and began to cut.
Everyone followed its serpentine coils. It dazzled with astounding intricacies.
“Wait.”
Looping fibres, clinging to one another.
“No.”
A complex weaving that seemed to debunk all common misconceptions of gravity.
“It wasn’t me.”
I couldn’t believe the way it all connected.
A not-so subtle break.
This little puppet of mine.
Sloughed were the important burdens I carried, now irrelevant trinkets. The thread of time pulled taught as a thousand possible futures wove together into one, my path through the labyrinth obvious.
As you lay at your mother’s breast I understood what it is to live.
Sunday, mid-October, winds starting to whistle. As our eyes connected, they turned into an almighty howl. A pack of passing wolves, deep into chase.
We were married by late February. Two children. A life together.
Some Octobers later, the winds picked up their howls once more. We braced ourselves, uncertainly.
She’s at it again
Who
That old Mother Nature
Ain’t no mother of mine
Slap
Mind your mouth
Slap
Mind your hands
Pause
Touché
Jeanne and Jean listened attentively to the thuds on the roof.
Jean and Jeanne thought those thuds were raindrops.
They were not.
Raindrops do not thud.
As a room we flinched - bodies wound tight with disparate fear as we watched the TV footage of a blurry shape hovering above the ocean. Birds had begun to drop from the sky on the day it appeared. I feared my call had been answered.