Angeline - Part 3

The rain was moving dark across the flatland. A great shadow seemed to proceed it, broken only by the jagged, tortured hands of the lightning that snatched occasionally at the brown earth. The old cat, who lived off field mice and crickets in the surrounding fields, had long since scrambled beneath the dilapidated porch. Above were the bones of a dog, nearly cleaned of flesh.

It would still be some time before the rain came. The land granted foresight for weather defeated only by darkness. Storms that rose in the night were the most dangerous. They came like bad dreams howling out of the deep forgotten mind and set horrible twisting winds down in backyards with only a low rumble for a warning. Day storms were not as bad. They announced themselves. They knocked before entering.

She was in her chair, rocking in the backyard dust, watching the great cloud bank roll in. She sneered at it and spit a great brown gob onto a nearby anthill. She smiled like a broken fence at the apparent success of her expectoration, watching the panic of the ants with shining eyes. She looked up again at the foreboding sky. Bet that siren’s goin’ off in town, she thought and took a long pull on her whiskey. Bet all dem folks is goin’ to ground. She smiled again.

In the front of the house a crow fluttered down like the last black leaf of fall and landed heavily on the bones of the dog. The sharp beak grabbed a tiny bit of flesh that hung from the empty ribs and tore it away. One last meal before the weather takes it all. One last bite before the ragged bird finds shelter wherever crows go to weather the storm.

The storm began to make itself known in a throaty, complaining, old man sort of way. As it drew closer that almost comforting facade would drop away to reveal the snarling beast inside, but for now she could still sit, drink and spit. S’gonna be a bad one, she thought and knew from long years. And, even as she thought it a long dark finger of cloud dropped to the ground and scrapped up a swirling trail of dust and distant debris.

She groaned as she stood and turned away from the storm with a sort of disdain unusual in the face of such weather. The wind was already singing low tones through the old barn and she could taste dust in the air waiting for the rain to beat it down into a short lived mud. In one hand she held her jug, in the other she dragged the chair. These were her prized possessions, the only things that would cramp the musty space of her cellar as she sat and waited out the scouring wind.

She smiled a dark, jagged smile and thought about the storm stripping everything. This wind’ll be the last a that old bitch on the porch an then I kin have it back. Deep down she hoped the bones would still be there. She hoped the storm would take the stink and the flesh and the dark birds feeding and leave her the bones. In another place, at another time she might have fashioned a crown or armor from those bones, but here, now, she would be content just to have them curled there like a statue of a dogs death in the corner of her porch.

Out front, beneath the porch, the old cat had found a corner in which to hide beneath itself. It would survive the storm there beneath the rattling boards and shivering bones. That porch had had enough of death in its time. It had had enough of giving things over to the other side. Now was its chance to protect, but the old cat didn’t know this. It shook and squirmed with scarcely understood terror in the dusty dark.

The woman grunted in the language of long years as she dragged the old chair down the rickety wooden stair and into the small basement. Her late, late husband had dug the thing many years ago, meaning for it to be a shelter and a root cellar and a place to store all that needed dark cool storage in the long days of heat and light. But, the soil was rocky and uncooperative, and he was short of temper, energy and sober moments. So, the great project ended as a small room with space for nothing more than a chair, an old woman and a jug of whiskey. Even the stair which came down into it rode a slope to the bottom and had no space behind for storage of supplies.

The storm cellar had a door, stolen long ago before another apocalyptic cloud bank, from the face of the old barn. They had slaughtered the last of the horses and could find no more use for a door on the dying structure. This door ended up being her husbands penance for the sad state of his cellar. That first storm it was simply a heavy piece of wood to lay across a small hole, but as time passed and the unfinished cellar gnawed at him, the sophistication and finish of that great door grew. In its final state, reached only days before a fevered death dragged the wasted man down, it lay across the opening of the cellar, fresh stained and riding on two smooth metal tracks. These tracks were fitted with bearings which allowed the door to open and close so smoothly that a child, were one foolish enough to wander into that place, could easily operate it alone. This is the only reason the old woman was able to pull it closed now and pitch her into the darkness of a single fluttering candle and a long wait.

She hooked the two great hooks of the door into their respective eyes and climbed back down, wheezing and muttering. Sitting in the chair again, with candle light playing cruelly in the dark shadowed creases of her face she drew long and hard on the jug, letting fire precede rain, letting the long slow burn come before the quick twist and tear of wind.
Sleep beat the storm and she sank down into it. It was a deep terrible thing fueled by age and whiskey, and each time she succumbed to it she wandered deaths long shore with one foot in the cool water. There she tasted the sour past on the ethereal breeze and spat into the wind of her own undoing. While outside the storm tore the world asunder.

She woke to silence and eerie dark. The candle had eaten itself to the floor and the storm had passed. She stood and made her way stumbling up the short stairs, undid the door and slid it smoothly open. There were vast and shining stars above her as she climbed out into the shadowy wreckage of her house. No wall stood and the roof of long days past was nowhere to be seen. Her meager possessions were strewn about or gone and the moon picked out bits of cloth, tins of food and the shining pieces of glass that once were windows. Turning around she saw the one thing still standing, completely intact. The porch, attached to nothing appeared untouched. Even its shallow pitched roof still hung improbably over it.

She grunted and went back down the stairs for the jug and the chair. She dragged them onto the porch and sat down for a drink. The old cat, rejoicing in the sparing of one of its few remaining lives sprang out from below and into the mouse filled fields with an almost youthful vigor. The woman drank, drank and passed out again.

When the sun rose it caught in its fiery eye the impossible porch, the sleeping old woman and the gleaming, clean skeleton of a forgotten dog.