The Storm Rolls In

The light goes wrong first. What was an ordinary, unremarkable afternoon begins to dim by slow degrees, the sun swallowed up behind a rising bruise of cloud that piles higher and blacker the longer you stand watching it climb the sky. The colour drains out of the land around you, greens turning to grey, and a hush falls over the birds and the insects, as though the whole world has drawn a breath and is holding it.

The wind arrives well ahead of the rest of it — sudden and cold and full of purpose, flattening the grass in long running waves, snatching at your cloak with insistent invisible hands and trying to turn you off the road. Then comes the smell of it, unmistakable: wet stone, cold iron, the green scent of rain still miles away. Far out across the dark horizon a jagged seam of white splits the sky, and some long, breath-held seconds later the thunder finally catches up with it, low and enormous, a sound you feel in your chest as much as hear. The first fat drops of rain strike the dust around your boots — one, and then a dozen, and then far too many to count — and within moments the whole world has closed down to a roaring grey curtain of water and noise, the road ahead lost somewhere inside it.