hail in june

june 2020

during the storm

The rain pierced invisible lines through what could have been daylight, saturating the ground, permeating the trees. Water ran from the roof, a sheet of glass perforated only occasionally by gusts of that obstinate wind. The clothes hanging off of me were weighted now, so unyieldingly leaden that no foreseeable escape presented itself but to lean back into the grass, a willing sacrifice to the storm’s whetted arrows. Each sliced through my shirt with the cold remorselessness that blades tended to have, darkening my own hair just the same as they matted the fur of the dog lying beside me. Do you hear that? I couldn’t help but whisper into the downpour as it steadied its speed, as it hardened its hail. There was nothing particularly to hear but for the spatter of rain on leaves, the aching howl of wind in branches, the peeling cracks of thunder that split the sky — that’s the world ending. That’s the sky, tearing itself apart. A smile found its roots where my lips met, the softness spreading like a sunrise across my face and suffusing it with the colour that the clouds so hauntingly lacked. Hail in June, the storm must have been thinking quietly to itself. How fitting, for a world turned so irreparably upside-down.

the end of things

Two crows flew across the sky, their trajectory passing from the great willow on the left to beyond the oak where the treehouse sat, as if to draw a conclusive line between tempest and calm. That’s it, they seemed to be saying, drawing momentarily apart on their course just to slide back into proximity, magnetised. That’s the end of it. And so it seemed to be. The puddles ceased their movements as bullets of rain held back from shattering the stillness of the ground. A wagtail landed on the wall next to the bridge, a single leaf fluttered down from the boundless skyline to settle by the plants in the rockery. The sky breathed, the wind stopped. The crows disappeared behind the darkened foliage and the world started turning again.