The Storm

The storm brought a winter-like-chill to the middle of summer and we smiled. The heat was destroying the scrap we called our homes and we were close to joining those that filled the sewers, but the rain changed that. It was the first we felt on our skins in months. We thought it would be the last for several more. Animals were hard to find but water was harder. We followed the animals and we found our pocket. It gave us just a little bit longer to live. This simplicity brought us back to our cores. Problems seemed to fall away. People were less depressed, not that there were many left, I always said people just needed something to focus on. Well when everyone you love and don’t suddenly die, you either die with them or not. Simple. 

The storms were always long. The delicate balance that global weather patterns held suddenly turned into monsoons only. Two to fours long storms lasting about a month or two at a time. I guess mother earth didn’t like our idea to bless the rains down in Africa. Simply put sci-fi hit the nail on the head. We finally went too far. Not that it was bad at first. Never is. We had effectively started to terraform Africa, back to our evolutionary past. Cutting out the desert, you know altruistic garbage. Not that shit matters anymore. The storm however changed things. Everything. 

I grew up when the sky was normal. I had seen clouds all my life, before the sky was barren. Before the only clouds you saw were grey and black. It was different. The kind of different that is just slightly off to unnerve you. To make you want to puke. The picture frame being off or you waking up still thinking you're in a dream. It was every uncomfortable feeling, it was still. It was a stillness that robbed you of thought. We all felt it. It covered every inch of sky and seemed to sink closer and closer to the earth. It felt you as much as you felt it. Then we saw them. First I swore it was my eyes. Had to be my eyes doing something. Uncountable. Unknowable. It was many.

It was still but it moved. Waved like the ocean, but rested like a pond. Our breath made it ripple. It hovered in front of our noses. It whispered into our ears and it reflected, it shimmered an opaque broken picture. It wore every thought that existed and didn’t. It undulated within itself. Its form was formlessness itself and all we could see was it. I felt my hands but I resided within it. It penetrated me but lay just outside me. It wrapped itself in forms and shapes of living and dead, portraying itself as a mixture of it all while somehow not being anything at once. At a certain point our brains tried so hard to comprehend it, to add a shape, a face to a mass of infinity we fell to insanity. Suddenly every person I knew was it, every animal and creature became twisted and grotesque and it was it. All together spreading across me and within me. Penetrated every vessel and nerve throughout me. It wormed its way into my nose and ears and eyes, I was it. 

It was then I tried so desperately to run. I felt myself. I ‘thought’ of running, but I was floating in between stillness and life. I was a painful expression of the nanoseconds it takes for a thought to become an action and for me it was a lifetime. It was the only motion in the universe, everything stood still in front of it. It gazed without eyes, moved without feet, it spread invisible tendrils of space across our lips and stole our words. I was nothing. I was a speck in the mass it was, it was not malicious, nor benevolent. It just was. It fell on our shoulders with the collective weight of knowing. Knowing broke us, like it had broken society when we knew far less than now. It spread across us and suddenly the storm was gone. 

We were tired and broken then. Too in shock to fully comprehend the ramification of what had descended on us. Some still willfully embraced the idea that it was just some mechanism of dehydration. Some sick hallucination brought onto us from the lack of our lives and water. Even I for a brief moment thought to myself that it was just some sick day dream caused by the heat of mid summer and the painful awareness of our shortened lives. As if we wanted something outside of ourselves to exist. Of course most of us believed in a God, but even that felt devoid of meaning when there was so little left. This was not the answer. The rain came shortly after. Some found peace in that, as if the world was washing us of the unnatural sickness we were all feeling. Denial has this funny way of making you nauseous.

So as we always did, we collected as much as we could and followed the animals, for food and for our next pocket. Wherever the water collected the most. The days and nights that came before we reached it were always painful. The risk of death was close to us, the risk of the storm that gave us life, quickly taking it away. Lightning storms scarred the earth and tornadoes moved fertile soil and blood across the land. The trek always meant injury and on the longest of migrations, death. We were not free, but life was simple. It had been simple. A pure lightless darkness fell over us and the first night began. Thunder filled our ears and the plasma scattering in the sky lit the way. 

The tents barely protected our heads from the rain, but we were dry for now. There was some solace in the minute protection it gave us and with that comfort we laid our heads to rest. The thunder became our music to fall asleep to, but something else laid in the deep guttural sound the sky gave. A thought penetrated my mind and I knew it did theirs too. That sound as it spread miles and miles was a remnant of the moment our worlds fell. It was with us somewhere in the space of existence and death, it laid there, and we could feel it like we did so many hours ago. Somehow silence became better than knowing. However I wouldn’t be blessed with silence. 

Only an hour had passed into the night, many of us had fallen asleep and all of us more restless than any night before. The thunder had muffled it at first. The thunder always filled our ears, but this time something was laying within it. It was the break that woke me. The few moments the sky wasn’t on fire had been filled with the blood curdling screams of my friends and family. I heard their cries and felt my heart ache into the night. None of us dared to leave the safety of our tents in fear it laid out there again. So I laid my head and waited for morning.

We moved forward. Didn’t dare speak of the night we had experienced. Just move forward, don’t think, don't dare think. Even when we saw the scratches, the bruises and the darkness in their eyes we dared not question. The day was long and wet, like it would be until we reached some formal location for shelter. I focused my mind on anything, on the ground that passed beneath my feet, on a distant memory of my first wife and how she would sing to me when the nights were dark. Something about her memory settled those demons raging in my mind. The guilt of stillness faded and I moved forward. Just not enough.

That night I was able to sleep just a little more, just enough to be plagued with their faces. Everything horrible and beautiful being torn asunder. Their pieces formed into a distorted mural filled in with haze and the disorienting feeling of alcohol and every drug ever invented and taken. I floated in horror and pain and when I heard her singing I awoke to their screams. They were worse than before and when they faded, I knew. I knew that laying my head would be a defiance to my humanity and I knew that I would let the world take my past. I knew.. I squatted at the edge of my tent. My fingertips at the zipper and my breath warm with fear. Suddenly there was silence again and I was asleep.

We moved forward in the morning ignoring the tents and the bodies that laid in them. We moved forward to a destination never far enough from that day. My mind was stuck in it. Even now when I close my eyes I feel like I’m falling back to that day and her voice rides along those waves. As it shifts and ungulates, her voice rides through it, and I'm stuck in that sickness. I don’t look back once, until I set up my tent for the night. It was only then I thought of how many were going to die tonight. Would we see the soil soaked with their blood or would the rain and wind wash the remnant of their life away. Then a sick thought filled my mind beside it, would it remember our faces as the world forgot ours. As humanity died to it’s hubris and it was all that was left would it remember us. 

The next morning I chose to face them. I walked into each tent, felt their warm blood on my hands, and saw the darkness where their eyes once rested. I saw the claw marks in their flesh as they tried so desperately to rip it out of themselves. To take the unclean out. Each time I stepped out the rain would wash them away. We would find the pocket just a few hours later, however this time knowing either we would die from our hubris or die to escape knowing.