A Thunderstorm is brewing. You can smell it here in Spindrift while it’s still two states away. In the late morning when the freshness starts to fade you can tell the first big one of the season is on its way. The humidity rises slowly, almost imperceptibly at first and then everything starts slowing down, like glycerin in water, as though the world is thickening.
Long about 1pm the barometric pressure drops so low that thin plate glass windows bow outwards. "Yummy" O’Toole stops watching "Lost in Space" long enough to listen to his windows creak. He never opens them, not since Brother dropped Punkin out of the upstairs window when he was five. Yummy listens and wonders if they’re going to open anyway. He doesn’t know that he’s remembering about Punkin using something other than his memory.
The sky has turned a dull shade of slate, light brown or gray and you can’t tell the difference because there is no point of reference. It’s so subtle that Auntie Ardell can’t remember when it changed from the brilliant azure ocean into the dusty looking void. Just as if God had washed the clay of creation off his hands and clouded up that pure rinse water. She thinks of Dante and Milton as she puts her cane out in front of her. Her last name is Weatheral and she muses that it’s a good name for today. She doesn’t know that the name goes back 1500 years to an old woman who was given it because she was doing just exactly what Aunt Ardell is doing today.
Over on Long-bridge Street, Jimmy McCoy is tossing a glass pop bottle in the air so that it flips end over end, and catching it by the neck as it falls. He’s been doing this for the last 3 hours, ever since he found it right where he’d left it the day before, pressed into the soft, black earth behind Mrs. Lancaster’s rose bushes. He had been surprised to find it there because he’d forgotten all about it in the way only a kid can… Utterly, as though it had never existed. He’d plucked it out, admired the perfect bottle shaped depression it left behind in the dirt and then sat in the sweet‑smelling darkness of the bushes, turning it over and over like a relic. The memory of the grape pop it had once contained was so vivid he could taste it. He’d screwed the metal cap back on the empty bottle very tightly on the previous morning and he could see yesterday’s air inside. It looked thinner and cooler than today’s air and the difference in pressure and temperature made the outside of the bottle sweat and its weight seem funny. He’d started tossing it in the air. He felt very protective of the yesterday world he’d managed to preserve, but he couldn’t help himself. The urge to throw destiny in motion and keep chance alive seemed to move him like wind from the coming storm. He began getting good at tossing and catching more elaborately, like a gunfighter twirling pistols. He began daring himself with each toss, binding mystical evocations of fate. If he caught this toss, he’d get a new bike, if he missed, he’d break his arm. Always, he caught the bottle.
It’s 1:15 now. The rewards keep getting bigger and the dares, more grave as he wanders on into the afternoon, walking to meet the storm halfway, until finally he has to bet it all. "If I catch it" he thinks, "I’ll find a million bucks on the ground. If I drop it" He hesitates, because to say it out loud is to admit that some part of him truly believes it will happen. On some level he must believe it will happen or the game wouldn’t be any fun. "If I drop it…I’ll die within the week."
He looks inside the bottle at the cooler, brighter world of yesterday, whispers, "I love you." with a sincerity that would have frightened his mother, and throws everything up in the air and into the waiting, colorless sky. Jimmy watches it tumble end over end in slow motion, yesterday helpless inside, heading straight for him, an easy catch, a baby could do it… but at the last moment he steps out of the way. He steps out of the way, because the truth that flickers into his mind at the last fraction of a second is obvious and inescapable.... the bottle must break. It’s the only way to get inside it. Unscrewing the cap would let yesterday seep out slowly like smoke out of the end of a cannon, fading away into nothing. He needs to break the bottle and release that grape‑flavored moment. The consequences don’t matter.
When the bottle strikes the pavement on Long-bridge Street, it makes a sound like a heavy light bulb bursting. The glass on the sides seems to vaporize, leaving only the thick bottom and metal cap, still screwed onto the shattered neck, both lying in a perfectly symmetrical spray of glitter on the street. The impact blasts the lottery ticket worth a million dollars that Dr. Wiemer had dropped the night before into a sewer grating. Jimmy doesn’t notice that, only the explosion. The catharsis was good, but it’s over now and he feels a little sad and guilty about yesterday smashed into a zillion pieces. Then he brightens, "only a game", he thinks, "A wicked game." He doesn’t know that nearly microscopic shards of bacteria‑ridden glass are making their way into the flesh of his ankles and delivering into his bloodstream a very rare virus that dissolves flesh.
It’s around 2 now, and a thick, muggy quiet has descended. Sounds take on a dull underwater quality. Monty Jansen and Ronnie Houston stop hammering on the railing of the tree house where they are planning to spend most of the summer, and strain to hear the soft rumble of distant thunder, but there isn’t any. Monty rubs the spot on his arm where the bruise is rising before he starts pounding again. Ronnie had to haul off and hit him to let him know he was serious when he told him to stop telling that story about old Riley’s ghost haunting the abandoned garage next to Miller’s ravine. Monty was always telling ghost stories and most of the time it was kind of fun, but today, what with the weather feeling all weird and everything, it was giving Ronnie the creeps. After Monty started going into detail about Riley’s ghastly after-life appearance, Ronnie’d about had enough and told him to knock it off. Monty had got this gleam in his eye and started to talk about how every one thinks that Riley had run off to South America to get away from the tax man but actually his wife had gunned him down for cheating on her, cut him up with a circle saw and buried him in a suit case behind the garage and then torched the place. That’s when Ronnie had socked him. They had been working in silence ever since. They don’t know that even though Monty thinks he made the whole thing up, every word is gospel and Ronnie got so bothered because, not so deep down, he knows its true as well.
The sky is starting to get dark now and its taking on a funny greenish tint. Gramma Pratt stops digging at her prize tomato plants that she’s been trying to grow all of her life, and wonders if there just might be a tornado warning on the radio. She thinks there must be a watch on for certain. She looks down at the sparse, scrubby vines tied to stakes with bailing twine and sighs. They aren’t really "prize" plants in the sense of winning anything but they’re special to gramma Pratt. Her mother brought them over from the old country and grew them for the whole town. Mamma had a way with her special tomatoes but Gramma Pratt just can’t seem to get them up and coming. She keeps trying ‘cause it’s all she’s really got left of her mamma. It’d be the only special thing she’d have at all if it weren’t for her secret. “Won’t be long now” she thinks as she stabs the soft earth with her spade. “Just about 8 weeks or so ‘til it happens again.” Gramma Pratt has a secret. A sacred, inexplicable secret that she’s kept since she was a little girl. Every 1st of August, going as far back as she can remember she wakes to find delicate butterflies of a shape and color she’s never seen anywhere else, crowding in her window like living stained glass. It’s always just after dawn when the sun is starting to shine on her eastern window. When she walks out into the yard, wearing nothing but her cotton nightgown the beautiful butterflies swarm about her, hovering and darting like a thousand humming birds that light on her face and outstretched arms. She waves her arms and giggles and feels blessed and loved and utterly benevolent as the fragile things whirl about her. She’s been performing this ritual for sixty-six years and she’s never told a soul. Gramma Pratt looks down and sours. She’s been battling them ugly green worms with the black tiger stripes that prit‑ near wipe her out every year and she’s finally got the upper hand with the gruesome little buggers. She thinks maybe she just might stand a snowballs chance at the county fair this year and squashes another one. She wants to keep going but that sky is looking pretty bad and she wonders if she shouldn’t run to the store or get in now, before the whole sky falls on her.
Gramma Pratt doesn’t know that her butterflies, which are actually an un-cataloged subspecies of Sphinx moth begin their brief lives in her garden because it contains the only nourishment capable of supporting their unique and delicate biology. A single, somewhat rare species of tomato plant.
The sky is close now, compressing the hot atmosphere and adding to the already high gravity. Spindrift braces itself. Sun umbrellas and awnings close up like folding canvas wings. Lawn mowers shut down one by one until the muted, two‑stroke growl that runs like a constant harmony above the full melody of summer, drops off to unnerving silence. Dogs and cats make their way to porches, back patios and under bushes to sit and wait in wise reverence. Even the insects have dug in, not a fly can be seen. The whole town waits in the thickening silence, braced against what feels like a whopper, the kind of storm that really knows how to make an entrance and will definitely leave its mark…
But it doesn’t happen…
No deafening, Doppler shifted thunder claps. No flickering plasma tapestries of lightning. No torrents of chill water dropping out of the sky all at once to slap the hot pavement. No sultry wind sailing the petrichor scent of wet asphalt like paper airplanes. No storm at all, not a single drop of rain. Something else happens instead, something that the town will hardly notice at first.
A lone figure wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket appears at the edge of town, walking with a fast, determined stride, pausing at the "Now Entering Spindrift" sign just long enough to add an extra digit to the Population number.
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