thunderstorm

This is by and large a true story, though my mother's blue vehicle is an SUV, not a sedan. I would appreciate feedback from anybody who reads the story. Under Canadian intellectual property laws, I am the sole owner of the story and I retain full rights to it.

The Night the Weather Brawled

By Kyle MacDonald

Thunderstorms played to a heavenly house that night, cracking knuckles of ribbed lightning in the alleys of the city’s steel and glass, casting light on the sunset but making no sound. The clouds, too, seemed distant, and there were far too many of them for the woman to feel at ease. She pulled out of the parking lot and drove through streets lined by streetlights that knew tonight they were out of their league. Behind her, the sky was black with the business of a hurricane-in-training; ahead, clear blue haunted the silhouetted trees on the horizon, free there of clouds but not of their sublime, terrible personality; eastward, a rainbow hung in the murky, disastrous storm like the shine on a three-day-old bruise. Her eyes, however, went inexorably west, for the sun’s last twilit stand was almost beckoning in the pale, disquieting way that a sunset has aflame.

Clouds did not hang in the sky but neither did they soar. They made the woman shiver in the hot August night. Her sons were mostly silent. When they did speak it was to indicate some other cloudy ridge that they all saw, that was at the same time unnatural and yet firmly Natural. A panoramic nimbostratus veil, miles thick and worlds above them, stretched across the entire gulf from east to west to deep on high; the elder son tried to count the smaller pastel-coloured clouds set sharply, brightly, against it. Resembling five or six, they numbered three dozen when he lost count. The sky had never been as vast.

The blue car wound its way into the river’s age-old valley, the geography tonight a backdrop on a one-player stage; though she drove slowly past the shadowy ankles of maple and oak spectres, she feared nothing: tonight nothing earthly could harm them, though ghosts of terrors past could conceivably emerge from the black trees. It was a night when anything was possible but the mundane. The mother braked, and the tires squealed softly beside a concrete bridge. Again a young girl, she held her cellphone out the window and focused the lens on everything. It was overexposure in the word’s most original sense. She stared at the screen’s blurred display, too awed to be frustrated – the sky would remember this night anyway in a way that photographs are blind. Her tail-lights came on, and the blue sedan hazed back onto the pavement and she followed the road home. Trees hummed past, but the sky hung above in a way that usually goes unnoticed.