Cloud To Ground

(Written for my friends, Jereny and Amy Tackett, and published in Kudzu, Summer 2008)

Slabs of rain smack the windshield of Jim’s truck. It’s a surprise rain, no forecast, no warning, just slabs of rain dumped out from smudged clouds trying to beat dents and then trenches straight through the earth. Every second that passes, the earth might just give in under the pressure, lop open like a torn apart orange and stretch its lava choked throat wide enough to take in Jim, his truck and everything else.

Jim tries to concentrate on the radio, to take the curves in the road from memory until the clouds go calm, come together in the dark sky and spare the earth. Ten minutes and he would be home.

The radio. Rain, rain, rain. No lightning, no thunder. The radio. Jim’s truck pushing its grill into the storm, first at moderate speed and then recoiling, backing away to slower and slower speed. Jim praying or talking, singing with the radio under his breath. Seven minutes and he would be home.

In the dark sky, above the world-hating clouds, all is calm, the even darker calm of the stratosphere, the floating held breath of the near cosmos. The labor of Jim’s truck is lost in this place, the slicing of the tires across two inches of dirty water creeping across the potholed pavement, the strangled off gargling of the motor. None of that exists here. From here it’s easy to see the smudged clouds are still full, hardly a drop of their hatred spilled.

Below, Jim is unaware of the scene from the cosmos. He still sings with the radio, pushes through curves from memory, navigates down hills with his knees pulled up to the steering wheel, expecting the storm to ease. He has no way of knowing the storm will not pass, that his memory will fail him in twelve seconds and that his truck will fall into the partly opened mouth of the earth, the muddy cavity that will swallow him.

From the stratosphere there is the still moment just before a sound occurs, the squirming of clouds and then the banging together, smudge against smudge, the lurch and then the real storm, a final spilling of weight, and the first clear blue-white bolt of lightning. The forecast, had there been a forecast, would have called this cloud to ground lightning. It touches down in the front yard of Jim’s house, just beside the rose bush. His wife flinches from the front porch. She bounces in the porch swing, her fingers strapped to her lips, ignoring the spray of rain from the gutter. She rubs her arms, feels the cold skin with her fingernails, the electrical air pulling up the fine hairs from her wrist to the her elbow. The familiar scent of a storm from childhood, before marriage, before worry. Beneath that, she thinks she can smell burned rose petals. She has not started crying. She keeps her lips in place with her fingers and feeds herself with hope. Starving, she will cry soon.

The last raindrop trails behind a million others, but only by a second. Still, it will be the last to land, and it will land, unlike many of the others, on the spinning tire of Jim’s truck, sloughed onto its side into the ditch. The raindrop spins small within the inner rim of the wheel, rotates five times quickly and then is flung out to mix with the rushing waters of the ditch, swept away from inside the cab where the brown water is rippled red, the deep red of front yard roses blooming wetly from Jim’s nose, mouth, ears, eyes.

Another still moment above the clouds and then the first and final pounding of thunder, the wailing of the scorched universe, darkness swallowing darkness.