Day 82 - Weather Event

 Weather Event 

Matthew Ryan Fischer 

 

There had been scattered rain over the past week and a half. Allison had a headache going on two weeks. Something in shifting barometric pressure always gave her a sinus headache. This had lasted and lasted though. Usually, the headaches came a day or two before the rain but then stopped once the rain began. It was a bit unusual to feel this way for so long.

“World’s worst psychic power,” she would joke to herself.

Allison was sitting at her desk when the room grew dark, and she felt a sudden chill. It was raining again. She didn’t hear it yet, but she knew. She had woken three times in the night to the patter against her window. Soon, it would be back.

For no particular reason Allison opened the blinds and stared out to watch the splattering against the concrete. The splashes in the bird feeder seemed abnormally large and Allison expected to see hail, but on the ground, she only saw rain.

There was, however, one spot of dry concrete. A little circle left untouched. Perhaps a bit more than a centimeter across, probably less than an inch. Allison watched the tree branches shake and dripping rain from overflowing gutters. She watched the splatter on the ground and the bird feeder that was almost full. The dry spot remained.

Allison went back to work, but a small part of her kept thinking about that dry spot, struggling to fight off the rain. She imagined it as some epic struggle. A David versus Goliath moment. Somehow that little spot was avoiding all rainfall, against all odds. Some energy or divinity shielding it. An hour later when it was time for another cup of coffee, Allison went to check on her newfound friend, and the dry spot, by some miraculous act of angles and wind, was still there.

Allison watched and waited, expecting the dry spot to disappear at any moment. She told herself she would stand in solidarity for as long as it took. He had assigned too much meaning to it and it had come to represent some sort of revolutionary act. She would hate to see it go, but as long as it held out, it gave her hope that she too could hold out and continue to struggle against all the difficulties of life.

She stood and stared. Focused.

The rain slowed. The clouds moved and blue returned.

As other areas began to dry, she was certain that her friend had held out and never been hit.

A day later, Allison read about an unlikely tornado forming the previous day over a hundred miles away. It was the worst tornado in the region in over forty years. Something in the winds had shifted yesterday, she thought. Something moved heaven and earth and her allowed her dry spot to remain dry, but caused this other chaos. She remembered the saying about the butterfly flapping its wings. Perhaps she was psychic after all.