To Simply Survive, Chapter 1.

The Thunder

I haven’t heard the thunder in six years; haven’t seen the lightning in longer than that. The dogwoods bark in the wind, and the river may make a splash on its banks from time to time, but that’s about all nature’ll give us by way of sound. That’s these days, anyway.

All across these stark desert plains- you see for miles. The river, cutting the barren, winding a ribbon of blue through the waste of a land that once was. The dogwoods, swaying and cackling on the sharp, unforgiving winds. This life, it runs through the most lifeless of times, God knows what follows with it.

Like that of a bride walking an aisle that she never wanted, the sky falls, an ever-thickening veil of melancholy. This skeletal dreamscape, deafening as it is silent, signals a wander of our species throes. Haven’t heard the thunder in six years; seen the lightning in longer than that. And yet, without warning, she strikes.

Demure lethality. She gallops horseback, narrow shoulders silhouetted against the hallowed half-light of our rising sun. Timeless, she is without origin, unbridled by any worldly thing; drifting between the frayed strands of this earth, as woven on a futile loom; a simple shadow cast soft against the dark. She swings a long chain from a balled fist, kicking the ash and cinder up from the ground below as the links sweep and shimmer slightly in the writhing dawn.

I don’t know where she’s headed. Maybe she rides for a new sun. A place where this all gives rise to a future certain. The infancy of our prosper, helmed modestly out of a lesser-troubled conception. I don’t know where she’s going, but she’ll get there. I know she will.

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