Work Text:
You start with a hot day, late July or early August. Mid eighties and up, high humidity, not a cloud in the sky. It’s a good day, with a hot cup of coffee in the morning then a cold shower to make your already sweltering living room less uncomfortable while you work, and the day only gets hotter. You waste your precious, sunny, daytime hours inside where the heat is less oppressive than outside, working or cleaning or trying to make plans with friends who are too busy to respond to you. You log off for the day, take another cold shower to get rid of the sweat. When you leave the bathroom, your house is darker. Usually it’s bright all day long, and the sun was still pouring in through the skylight and the windows when you went into the bathroom, but now it’s dark, like the sun had almost set in the half hour you were showering. The world is still and silent, waiting with breath held for what comes next.
The thunder rumbles through eventually. It’s the long, slow, quiet kind of thunder where at first you think it’s a truck passing in the distance, until it doesn’t stop, increasing in volume until there’s only one thing it could be. Then there’s the wind, rustling through the full summer foliage of the trees that line your yard, chasing you in through an open window. Through the skylight, you see the top of a pine tree being whipped back and forth. It’s trunk has stood, massive and powerful, for longer than your family has been in this country, but it bends like a twig to this wind.
The rain comes and goes, never more than a slight drizzle on the roof, but always threatening more. Or maybe promising more; maybe it is not a destructive force to be feared but something sacred, something that brings life back to the world, something that rejuvenates this parched landscape and washes away any evil that has come to rest on it. You sit on the couch, and watch the drops land on the skylight and the pine dancing with the wind, and you contemplate your smallness.
When it really pours, it’s deafening, echoing around your house and distorting your view of the pine tree, transforming it into haunting monsters that shift and move with every drop. You can’t take your eyes away, desperate for the crack of lightning that will blind you for just a second, for the roll of thunder right, so impossibly loud to be heard over the millions of fat raindrops crashing against your roof. The open windows will be an afterthought, nothing more than a damp sill when the storm is no longer raging in your home. But this part lasts for a few minutes at most, and when the water clears you watch the pine again, branches moving gently with the wind and a light patter on your roof that does very little to obstruct your view.
You slowly find yourself back in the present, box fan whirring as blows much cooler air against you, book forgotten on the table next to you, though it’s much too dark to read and turning on a lamp would ruin the magic. Cars whish by in the street, headlights occasionally angling through windows. The rain’s pattern continues, the slow breathing of a giant as it cycles between drizzles and downpours. You let out the breath the earth has been holding since this storm first rolled in. The pine tree is still standing, the air is much cooler, and, for now, you are okay.