After the Storm

The sky had that naked blue intensity that always charged it the day after a big storm. Tomorrow it would be clouded by a thin film of milk; in the days after that the clouds would thicken, the humidity would rise, tempers would begin to fray in the muggy, buggy heat. Finally the moisture would seem to congeal into a solid mass, pushing against sinuses and temples and warning the vigilant to stay indoors. Then the clouds would boil up out of the valley — black, with a sulphurous tint to them, as if the devil were mixing phials in his underground lab. The taste of rain would fill the air — a coin laid across the tongue — and the wind would whip up out of nowhere, windows banging open and shut across the town, cloth awnings wracked like sails in a typhoon. At last the first flash, the answering roar, the first ecstatic hiss of rain. Then the hiss rising, the blank spray erasing the buildings and mountains beyond, the great black beast in the sky voiding himself into the valley that bore him, and that would receive him, and that would swell in verdant peace in the aftermath of his fury.