[TALE] After The Storm
Civilization is but a thin veneer over the titanic power of nature. Though mundane life may furnish us with ideas of our mastery over nature, these are quickly scattered to the winds with a mere passing storm. In our offices and before our computers we may esteem ourselves kings, but when the sky darkens and the ground trembles, when the wind lashes the windows and howls like a thousand furies, we scurry away like frightened monkeys. But the wind stirs more instincts in us than just primal fear. We are humbled when the very sky itself tears through our feeble fantasies of power; yet when mountains rend themselves asunder, every man stands taller. Brought before the elemental power of nature, something of the elemental also awakens in man.
I learned of these things at an early age. One night, I awoke in total darkness. Not even my nightlight was shining, and the streetlights had gone dark outside my window. But where the light had gone, a terrible sound had taken its place. It was a monstrous roaring broken by violent buffets and crashing strikes that shook the very foundations of the darkness. A storm was raging through my tiny village, and the sounds terrified me.
I listened to the storm for some time, crawling under my blanket to hide. It was of no use – I felt no safer under my feeble blanket than I would have standing on the roof. The storm was relentless. I thought about going to find my parent in the other room, but with the power out the whole house was thrown into pitch black darkness, and it made me feel even more isolated and afraid. So I stayed in that darkness, alone in the cacophony that raged from outside. I had become like a string in a great void, shivering to the vicious tunes that played me without mercy.
My imagination was my greatest enemy here, as it danced to the sonorous savagery and filled my mind with all manner of horrors. I began seeing things, claws rending the darkness and tearing down the walls around me. I felt how the wind hurled me to and fro, as if I had been tossed helplessly into the night. Merciful sleep came to me only in fits and starts. As I drifted aimlessly between two separate realms of darkness, new terrors emerged from my dreams to haunt me.
To my double sight, a great void serpent lashed out at our little home, a house hurled into the infinite abyss. From the mouth of this beast came a roar that could drown souls in abject terror. It coiled itself around my home, hurled itself at it with its great scaled body, scraping the walls and tearing the roof apart. I saw eye slits that burned with a nightmare ferocity through windows that were crashed open by the violence. Gusts of wind tore my flesh and burned through my dream body like ice-cold void fire. A great maw chewed my flesh in a hundred ways, reducing me to mere viscera in the cold, howling nothingness.
Daybreak came like the sudden end of a fever. I rubbed my weary eyes to the dim sunlight shining through gray clouds. It took me a few moments to realize that my house still stood as it had before the storm. My room was eerily silent, a silence made all the more potent by the numb cold in the air.
I shivered as I crawled from under my covers and, with jerking motions, put on my clothes. I caught a glimpse of the world outside of my window. The village looked like a ghost town, as if the storm had taken the inhabitants and left the houses. I could see traces of debris under the gray sky. At the sight of the silent village, I was filled with a sudden curiosity. I needed to investigate.
As I came down from my room I saw that the night had transformed my house. The air was still and silent, filled with a dim gray gloom. The gray silence bit me with the same numb cold I had felt in my room. The remains of burnt out candles littered every room, and drawers and boxes had been left opened with their contents piled here and there. Someone had rummaged around my home in the light of slowly dying candles. When I reached the kitchen, I understood why.
Crouched by the old wood stove, feeding old magazines into the dying embers, was my father. By the look on his face, he must have been up all night trying to banish the void serpent with his little fire, the only source of warmth we had left after the power went. He didn’t acknowledge my presence, and I snuck out into the frost-covered morn.
*
The tempest must have sucked the color from the world, for between the sky and the frost everything seemed steeped in a shade of melancholy gray. The sun itself could not be seen, save as a smudge of light far beyond the hazy clouds. The same harsh silence seemed to permeate the air outside as it did inside, for no machinery could be heard. In contrast to the violence of the night, the winds of the day were still. Not a single thing moved in the frosty morning. The leafless trees stood out like skeletal hands reaching for the skies in their final moments, the flesh torn from their bones by the serpent.
All before me I saw debris strewn out onto our lawn. Some had come from our house, like the roof tiles that lay smashed on the pavement. Some had come from the trees, for a large skeletal branch had been torn from our plum tree and now covered the car in our driveway. What looked like the neighbor’s trashcan had been hurled at our house by the winds, the crows delighting in tearing its reeking innards to shreds on the grass. Far in the distance, I could see the flag pole of the community hall lying against a house, the force of the wind having torn it from its foundation.
Despite the still grayness of the village, I felt as if the air was somehow more alive than usual. There was a sense of potential seeping from the cold silence – the storm had cleared the slate of mundane life, its violence transfiguring the boredom of routine into the promise of new possibilities. It was an inversion of the common ennui that seemed to be ubiquitous to everyday life. Where now there was a life that shone through the world with hidden colors, before there had been the false colors of hazy banality under which gaped the numbness of death. The void serpent had turned the world on its head – we now rested our feet in the dizzying skies. It was intoxicating.
This tension drew me out into the still air, and I began to explore the village. The eeriness was palpable as I passed through streets of battered houses, neither light nor person visible through the windows. Evidence of the violence was all around the village – in the claw marks on the roofs where tiles had been stripped off by the wind, in the fallen trees that lay across hedges and in the sound of cracking glass under my feet.
Through the smashed driver side window of a car, I could see belongings still remaining on the passenger seat, as if the void had swallowed the driver and left the rest. More than once I spooked the crows that had come out to pick among the strewn garbage, and their cries broke through the depths of the silence. Not a single person could be seen by the town square, and I stood there submerged in the uncanny feeling that I was passing through a land of shades.
Yet I felt no dismay at what I saw. I felt instead as if I had wandered into some strange gray springtime, as if I stood in the moment right before death gives way to life.
*
As my wandering continued in this world frozen by elemental violence, life began to stir. Little by little, curious eyes and wary faces began peeking through the windows and half-opened doorways. The new morning was calling them, and one by one they answered the call. From the houses emerged people, the weathered faces of old men surveying the state of their battered homes. They seemed pensive in the stillness and the cold gray silence, as if tasting the tension of life in the air.
I spoke to some of them, commenting on the fearful storm and on the damages done. They spoke of what they had seen and heard during the night, and many of them smiled as they spoke. They picked among the debris and went about repairing their homes without much loss of cheer. Soon there was movement all around me, and the silence began filling with the lively chatter of neighbors as they began to bring order out of the chaos around them.
Neighbors that had not spoken in years were suddenly working side by side with one another to clear debris from their lawns or patch up their roofs. Timid office workers walked with an unusual surety as they dirtied their hands in the newly-born chaos. I myself learned the names of men and children that I had lived beside all my life yet had never known. In the melancholy gray, a new sense of purpose and unity seemed to grow like spring flowers.
As the day progressed, the streets and lawns were cleaned of detritus, roofs were patched up, broken windows boarded up and food was prepared. The lights had not returned when the sun began setting – but there were now small globes of orange light shining among the houses and from the oil lamps in the windows. The cold made way for slivers of warmth as fire replaced electricity, the smell of burning wood rising through the village from stoves and grills. The newly awoken world settled down, families retiring by the hearths of their kith and kin.
When I came home, my whole extended family had gathered around the wood stove to prepare food. A pile of wood lay to the side, enough to last through the night. The kitchen was a warm respite against the numb cold that filled the rest of the house, and we all sat huddled around the fire in the soft yellow glow of the oil lamp. Faces were awash in light and dancing shadows as we ate and told tales, laughing and cracking jokes at the ferocity of the storm. There was a levity in the air, as if the calm night had spirited us away from the great serpent and hidden us here in the warm glow of home.
Refreshed by the fire and food, we children crawled out into the darkness of the house to play. We hid in the pitch black darkness, stalked and pounced on each other, played hide and seek with a flashlight. We had accepted the void, had sought it out, had made it something to be toyed with. We played like this throughout the night – until the sudden onslaught of light and sound signaled the return of power.
Life had returned to normal in the blink of an eye. We played video games until the early morning hours. When I awoke the next day, the village was almost completely restored. Only the embers in the old wood stove were left in the morning as a reminder that a great tempest had ravaged our home. And the people soon forgot the tension in the morning air which had given them a renewed sense of life. Banality returned, and with it boredom.
But I remember that strange levity of instinct which seizes us in the face of elemental ferocity. And whenever lighting strikes or a blizzard passes, when the great rainfalls come and the winds howl, I can sometimes see how the haze lifts from weary eyes and the great primal spark returns.