Monday, January 10, 2005
Bad Weather
It’s been a great weekend and 2005 is starting off very well. This, regardless of a meteorological battering we’ve been getting since before christmas. This morning is a stormbreak, but soon enough the rain will start again, which mainly means I can’t wear my new leather jacket to work. The earth mourns this loss of a critical sartorial influence, but I’m sure it’ll clear up enough by August for me to get a bit of use out of the new coat. In the meantime I feel well rested even though I did not sleep much last night; the new auditor starts today - easing the most confusing part of my workload for me; I’ve packed a truly excellent salad for lunch; and I’m looking forward to a week of productive and engaging efforts at the office and at home.
With everything so right except the weather, I’ve been thinking back on a story idea I had years ago about a week of bad weather and the people who live in it. And here it is. I know I said on friday it would be a five-part serialization, but as it turns out, there’s not enough of it for that. I’m giving it all to ya in one big shot. Because that’s the kind of guy I am. You know what they say, if you don’t like the weather, get out of the kitchen.....
Monday morning was clear, warm, still: a petri dish of a morning. But low pressure formed offshore before noon, and an inland breeze rose to lose itself there, blowing warm and dry across the city. By dusk the wind was moaning steadily in the foothills. The blue of the sky pierced her heart. She patted her lips with her tongue and turned to him. “We have to talk.”
Tuesday was also dry and very hot; the wind blew ceaselessly and strong. There was dust adrift in it - a mineral haze that blurred edges and obscured distances. The gusts were getting powerful enough to take down some older trees. It stung his eyes when he was outside; even indoors he could feel the house creaking against the gusts. The walls around him were warm, transmitting the heat that simmered outside. Around sunset he stared through the window, the sand in the wind bouncing impotently off the glass. “Funny,” he thought, “they’re really the same thing.”
Wednesday broke sweltering and dark, like a murky epilogue to Tuesday night. The linens lay tumbled on the floor; in the light of the bedside lamp she noted the distinct sweat stains each of them had left on their respective sides of the rumpled mattress cover. The wind was howling, hurling sand and heat, until about noon. Then, suddenly, it stopped. The heat continued to build, though, under overcast skies, tangibly, inexorably. The humidity rose; the windows were sweating. As evening finally fell, the words he spoke to her hung in the air like baked felt: “You always only remember the stuff you could just as easily forget.”
Thursday morning: on the sidewalk at dawn, a sheen of dirt that was almost mud gleamed dully. The air lay hot, still and thick, a moist embrace from which she could not extricate herself. As the day crept toward a slow boil, they began to hear the rumble of real weather over the horizon. He’d soaked through his shirt with sweat before breakfast and nothing dried in that torpid air, but around eventide a chill descended rapidly and they each shuddered, involuntarily, at once. Cold air washed swiftly through the house and a door left open in another room blew shut with a loud bang. “That door never gets closed properly,” she said mostly to herself.
Friday came with a hard freeze and an icy mist that thickened as the day matured. On the windowpane, dust left behind by the earlier sandstorm went opaque, then rolled down and away in random lugubrious droplets that cut tenuous paths of transparency down through the dirty glass. As the somber grey day went shot with blue before the evening’s black, a loud crack presaged the cloudburst; a freezing rain of tiny droplets poured from the lowering sky. The streets were quickly washed clean of windblown dust and sheets of rain scoured the windows as the storm swallowed the last of the daylight. He handed her his supper plate. Turning, she dropped it and it shattered on the coffee table. He hurled his cup against the curio shelves and shards scattered across the floor, glinting and sharp.
Saturday brought strong cold wind. The rain let up and the sky was very clear; the air was so clean it almost hurt to breathe. All the fallen rainwater had turned to ice. Ice caked the window and rimed the world outside. In the late afternoon they both watched a row of clouds roll in, thick and dark, stretching from horizon to horizon. At dusk, the front reached them. The air went black and their lungs seemed to empty into a pause in the screeching wind that had blown all day - and then, the deluge: large drops of rain and some hail, on a hard swirling wind that whipped up against the walls and under the eaves, furious and invasive, drops so large the air was mostly water. The house braced against the onslaught; rafters overhead groaned. “If you want anything done around here you have to do it yourself,” he muttered as he lurched up off the sofa.
Sunday, dusk, was dreary and tepid. The cold snap had broken. A sickly mist dangled near the ground outside, and no appreciable breeze blew. Eddies of fog spun blue columns as evening fell. She opened the window a crack, then a bit more. Soon it was all the way open and she hung her head out the open window, let the night wash her face. She said nothing. No one spoke to her.
