The wind was already blowing as I made my way out of the house, my coat snapping against the front door as I locked it. Pocketing the key, I turned into the teeth of the incoming storm and began to walk.
The dock was a few blocks down and one street over, empty in the early winter evening, waiting as though it did not care if timid humanity ever appeared there again. I walked out careful but sure, and the boards and the stones and the waves all welcomed me, recognizing something in the steady way I looked at them. Earth and wood were distant cousins, but family nonetheless. Water was closer kin, and to be respected.
Ice had formed on the edges of the posts, grinding against the bottom of a wooden skiff someone had decided wasn't worth the effort to store this year. In the setting sun, strange rainbows glinted off the patches, sharp and bright compared to the soft echoes of color rolling across the underbellies of the stormclouds above.
There- to the South. From the South, they came. The wind shuffled them from one side to another, playing with them like a child who doesn't know its own strength, but they remained undaunted. Opening their mouths, they shrieked welcomes, news of home, joyous greetings that had nothing to do with humans' false manners. They came for me, they screamed for me, and I opened my mouth and screamed back, throwing my head back and my arms wide to draw in more breath. The sound of the storm was rising, sound so thick it was silence, but I knew they could feel my cries in their very bones.
The wind picked me up, catching every piece of me and straining my back, but I held myself open for the joy of it, for the weightless rising and the delicious combination of freedom and helplessness. They arrived above the dock, and I could not tell if it was me or them who shouted, if it was the sun off their wings or the ice, if I danced in air or water. Facing into the wind and tilting up, I flapped like mad, holding myself in one place as I challenged the sun and water to forget what I was, what I would always be. The dock knew it- all of them did.
The clouds were passing over too soon. The sun went down and darkness crept up from the East, but still, the humans would be out, would touch sacred things with their eyes and dirty them by pretending they were something else. With one last almost-despairing wail, I descended again and sank onto the welcoming rough boards. For a long moment, the others danced around my head, sympathizing, moaning my loss. Then they rose, swinging higher until they caught a strong wind and disappeared, one by one, back to the South from which they came.
I wrapped myself in my coat and lifted my clothing, hiding it against my body as I walked slowly back toward the house. In the distance, the last rumbles of thunder echoed and faded, taking with it the wild wind.
I leaned my head back and gave one last defiant scream, which echoed off the clapboard houses. "Kria! Kria… kria… kri…"
I fancied they could hear me in the South.
- Megan Morris, ©2000
*Inspired by Cheryl Wheeler's "The Storm."
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