This scene will go no where, if indeed it's anywhere to begin with, but thought I'd throw it on here in the absence of any other blog content in my head, at the moment.
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It has just finished raining, a hard, violent and quick downpour. The smell of wet dust, pine and ozone rises along the banks of the now swollen river. The storm's wind has enough yet to lift branches skyward as if the trees, greedy for every bit of wetness after so long a drought, are reaching to prevent the mist's escape. Five large ravens ride the undulating branches, screaming with delight, lifting themselves powerfully into drying flight as the sky begins to clear behind a weak line of gray cloud racing to catch the towering thunderhead which leads the storm toward the eastern horizon. The oldest of the ravens, and the best flyer among the small murder, flies stomach skyward for a moment before allowing herself to fall, briefly, like a stone. She marks where the returning afternoon light has caught on the face of a man's watch. She rights herself and joins the rest of her band with a squawk, sharing news of the sparkling object.
Other than lifting their dangling feet from the river, careful of a lightening strike out on the water, Jordan and Andrew have silently sat during the rain, as eager for saturation as the trees. The brothers have let the storm wash them with its pelting rain and wind, with flashes of brilliance in the prematurely darkened afternoon, and with cymbals of thunder which have left ghost images ringing in their ears. Dark hair raising on the back of his neck, Andrew the older, more muscular of the two, had flinched inwardly -- never revealing fear to Jordan. Never. Andrew had almost cried out then, sure lightening was going to sear its way along the sinewy lines of his body. His silent control not needed, his shriek would have been consumed by the thunder which instantaneously accompanied a spectacular spike of light which boiled a point of water some 70 metres off the end of the dock where the two men sit. "That was a close one," Jordan had said, breaking the silence with no more emotion than had he asked Andrew to pass the shaker of salt at dinner the night before. Invisible to Andrew, Jordan's heart had quickened in the natural violence of the storm, skipped at the close-call. His calming mantra had been to tell himself again and again that the tallness of the trees would protect them. What he had wanted to do was to flee to the grounded safety of the SUV parked in among the trees. "The safest place in a storm is a refrigerator or your car..." he had lectured himself, silently. "I must remain strong for Andrew. If I don't hold up, we'll all collapse," he thought, echoing the burden his grandfather had stuck him with when Jordan's father had died when Jordan was just 15, his brother eight.
The storm had done little to defeat the killing stranglehold the river valley has been in, gripped by the sun's unrelenting heat this year even before all the snow had left the coolest retreats among the trees. As it regains dominance, the sun is lifting the wetness from Jordan and Andrew and steam rises from their wet clothing and hair, crafting, revealing auras. "Like his soul, leaving" -- identical thoughts, unspoken, from both men. Jordan hopes to soften the thought with a small smile. They might have spoken at the expression, but Andrew does not see. Looking away, Andrew watches something dancing where sun and water become diaphanous mist. Swinging his legs from under himself, he drops his shoeless feet back into the river.
A hundred kilometers away the storm accomplishes nothing but disturbing flags and darkening the northwest sky. Marion Crawley, startled, sits upright in the hard, wooden rocker where she has fallen asleep, lulled there by the drone of the air-conditioner and the boredom of a predictable plot in a paperback novel, which has fallen to the floor. Marion shakes off the nap's grogginess with her son's name. "Jordan?" His mother has awakened at the moment of the lightening strike.
