I wrote to you the day before yesterday; a letter that the breeze caught. Let me start again. That day, I was writing to tell you about the difficulty of Christmas dinner for one. So much about it seemed insurmountable. The waste of turkey. The search, right on closing time, for fruits and vegetables out of season. My sluggish ceiling fan versus the unbearable heat of the oven. And I thought, maybe we shouldn't have Christmas in the tropics.

What I wanted you to know is that when the rain came, late that evening, I felt relief. Maybe it was going to be a real Christmas after all. Not a white one, but a wet one at least. I opened the louvres to let the breeze in. I stood there, eyes closed, letting that cool wind hit my face. Across the street, a woman was shouting at her children to get inside. And I thought, let them play in the rain.

Imagine this: you shelter under a folding card table. The windows, the walls, the roof of your house will not save you. You watch it all, everything you own, fly past your face. At two hundred miles an hour, it somehow seems to happen in slow motion. A string of silver tinsel. Your wardrobe door. The side mirror of your neighbour's car. By morning, it will all be in a pile with the rest of your city. My city. Did I mention I won't be back for a while? I'm sorry about our little trip to Cornwall. You'll find someone else.

It must seem as if I'm leaving something out here. To paint a picture of the whole would be impossible. But let me tell you about wind. It is not just air. It has weight. It has hard, scraping metallic edges. It has a voice. The earth, when it chooses, can open its jaws and scream.

 

 

 

Alicia Bakewell is a sporadic creator of tiny stories. Her flash fiction piece, ‘Barely Casting a Shadow' was a winner of the Reflex Fiction competition in the UK, and closer to home she won the Lane Cove Literary Award for her short story ‘Lucy' in 2015. She dabbles in poetry and loves an open mic, but only if no one in the audience knows her.

 

 

© Alicia Bakewell

 

Published in Twice Not Shy: One hundred short short stories by Night Parrot Press (2021)

 

www.nightparrotpress.com