Storm Flash Fiction

Summer Solstice has sung but nothing except dull skies and rain greet my window.  We're heading for stormy weather so I thought I'd share a flash fiction piece I wrote a few weeks ago during a 'borrowed' summer storm, and inspired by Adam of The Book of Darkness and Light over on Facebook, who has been sharing amazing, free writing workshops over lockdown.  (And yes, events are still ongoing and yes, you should check them out, especially if your passions lie in the more ghostly and macabre!)

Broadcasting the storm that raged in his little corner of the UK over Facebook Live, he challenged us to listen and write for 8 minutes and just see what the weather invoked.  Dampened spirits perhaps but with wet ink!

Here's mine! I hope you enjoy!

Ps I don't usually share my writing but something clicked that day, perhaps it was the power of the storm

(Pixabay Free Usage - image by enriquelopezgarre)

When the storm started...

...Cara didn’t notice for she was sound asleep but her body noticed, her mind noticed, jolting at the clash and bang of omnipotent thunder, the flashes brightening closed eyelids.  It heard the trickle of water against window pane, the plops rebounding off tarmac and the dings from the pinged copper birdbath in the garden below, incessant and cumulative like a percussive orchestra roused to practice in the pre-dawn hours. 

Deep within her subconscious the familiar tension mounted, the jarring of atmospheric static grated upon her dreamscape like a dark cloud upon a protective mesh that bordered between ‘the world’ and pure somnambulic imagination.  Its particles shredded into fat droplets as the bedroom in her mind began to flood, cold water rising, rising, ever rising and she awoke within the dream to water everywhere, sloshing down poster-covered walls, between light fittings, her discarded clothes floating in slowly moving blackness a foot off the floor. Finding that protective place shielded in the innermost recesses of her unknowable brain, she slunk inside. 

When finally she wetly awoke, finally calm, under a clear, albeit overcast sky, she looked with horror at the carnage surrounding her, radiating out in a visible blast zone from her makeshift bed on the forest floor. 

The morning after the storm was the morning Cara truly understood that she could never again go home.