The Weather

It was dark and beautiful in the distance. A little closer, smokey grey clouds rolled in the sky like giant kittens, and, freakishly, the sky directly above my sister's house was mystery (milky?) blue, strange and Siamese. When fist-sized hailstones began to thump lazily onto the lawn, I could not resist, and took myself and the baby outside. So I was standing there when I saw them, the baby in my arms: three tiny funnels that licked down from the cloud, tasting the red sky, once, twice. They were so diminutive that I almost laughed. They looked like toy tops, whirling fast enough to appear still. I watched as they stepped delicately onto the thin horizon line and gripped it like tight-rope walkers, whirring from side to side, but never stepping off the wire, and now not so small. The dervishes glissed left and right, graceful and loose at the hip, steady above as though clothes-pinned at the shoulder to the line of cloud. The hailstones were coming faster and harder, but with my arm over my head and the baby's warm head tucked under my chin, I was able to avoid most of the stones by weaving a little as I hurried back toward the house. But our progress was suddenly arrested. There was a roaring inhalation, a great gasp from the sky, and the smell of ozone shot in a blast straight to the back of my head, making me giddy. I let out an involuntary whoop, part laughter, part praise, and the baby must have felt it: she jack-knifed herself toward the air, using my chest as a platform. Her strong longs and sharp toes dug into my chest and I held on. Her mouth and eyes flew open wide and she waved her arms. I raised her up to see the tight-rope dancers, the three spinning tops, both of us laughing now, gulping lungfulls of sweet ozone as the barometric pressure crashed. I waved the baby, the baby waved herself. I laughed again, and raised her higher, as high as I could.

I'm not sure what made me look at that exact moment, but I turned toward the house just in time to see my sister do a sort of cannon-ball off the steps of her porch. She cleared the three stone steps with ease, made a perfect two-point landing, and got her stride as she sprinted toward us across the enormous lawn. The noise of wind and hail was very loud, so I could not hear what she was saying, but I could guess: her mouth was shaped in fury, teeth biting lower lip to get enough power into the squeezed, hissed eff sound of "you flake!", or "you freak!" or something familiar like that. Her face, contorted with effort as it was to get the words out with enough force, was still noticeably beautiful. This is one of my sister's gifts: that she has a pretty face, even in rage, and this has always been a distraction to me, and it was so, no less than any other time, as she gained ground. I was thinking of this, of how pretty she looked, sprinting toward me and the baby, who I was holding up in the air. And maybe I was smiling a bit, thinking, "she's so pretty!", and maybe I said, "pretty!" as my sister got closer, the eff sound clutched in her teeth like a bit. She lunged upward and grabbed the baby, still running.

Standing there with my arms stretched above my head, I was struck with an immediate, profound and irrelevant understanding of football: I had heard an audible snatch! as my sister plucked the baby from my grip, and for a moment I saw the word suspended in a cartoon bubble over my head right where the baby had been.

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