She leaned
against the rail, looking out over the river valley below, listening
to the soft shushing sound of the wind in the locust trees and the
diffuse whir of traffic from across the river. The lights over there
and all across the hills were strangely comforting, perhaps because
they transformed a run-down hull of urban decay into something almost
beautiful. Either way, it was the kind of midsummer night she
adored: soft, and barely below the threshold of being too warm;
unoppressively humid; breezy, cloudy. There was always a presence to
this kind of night, a loud quiet that was like a stereo turned way up
without any music being on. It was an inscrutable prelude to an
unknowable event.
A sustained
rush of warm air, a deep breath full of the scent of night, eyes
closed, senses tuned, a world of possibility lightly brushing its
fingertips along the blank canvas of desire, of dreams, of
hopes...she listened, she felt, she tasted the very air, sensing in
it something unstoppable and welcome, a long-sought moment, a break
from the arrow-straight vector of life she had unwittingly followed
up to this moment, this indescribable Now with its infinite depth and
singular vibration.
She opened her
eyes and saw on the distant horizon dim amber flashes in the sky.
People called it heat lightning, and though she never really
understood why, she did know the feeling: that first distant rush of
some kind of electric flux, a storm that clears the air, the torrent
that brings calm.
*
©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley
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