Status Updates From A Dry Spell

“He passed houses with the doors swung open, yawning cavities, the windows like eyes. The dust made everything the same strange noncolor, accentuated by the thin light and the still air. Everything looked dead; as though it had been dead a long time, like pictures of ghost towns.”

“He looked caught in the middle of a rainstorm that had already happened. He was still, like silence. Locked in stone.”

“The voice she used seemed to echo out of her, blasting forward like a gust of wind and sounding not quite human.”

“It should have been just him and the rain, and the magnetic connection that made him who he was. The anticipation of opening the skies and letting the torrent loose, setting free the animal held captive in the sky for so long, should have elated him. He should have felt damn good, knowing that by tomorrow Goodlands would be once more under open skies, the barrier fallen, the lock struck open. But he didn’t.”

“Crossing Nevada had been a rehearsal in death: the long expanse of nothing, the frightening, glaring heat, the deathly night chill, the stark aloneness, the feeling that you were the only one left on earth, and earth was dry and dead.”

“For the longest time, she avoided her reflection. Until she couldn’t stand it any longer, felt stupid. So she stared at herself. Like a fast trick of the light (or a ripple in the glass), something flickered across her face, eyes superimposed over her hair pulled back, tiny, freckled nose, none of it her own. The horror of the nightmare came back.”

“Rain exploded with a crash of lightning that seemed to come from his chest. He could feel the thunder when it cracked, the lightning breaking up the skies with blazing light. It came from him, an invisible cord that he pulled but couldn’t see. It was his and he knew it right from that first time.”

“Karen stepped out of the gazebo and hurried in the direction of the house. As she got closer, she felt an overwhelming sense of relief that it hadn’t disappeared, that she wasn’t standing in the middle of an empty field, even though the thought was preposterous.”