Winter noisily clears his throat.
“Good Christ,” he says, “I just can’t shake this thing.”
He theatrically spits,
paTOOey, like Clint Eastwood,
into the Great Lakes region.
(Another record-breaker in Buffalo).
The Wind hisses, snaking through the dead leaves that carpet the frozen forest floor.
“Repulsive,” she mutters, and the waving grasses nod in agreement.
Winter is not in the mood. He freezes the grasses where they stand.
The Wind shimmies up the nearest tree and settles herself on a boney limb. It sways gently, as if underwater, and a few lean grackles startle and take to the air.
“What’s eating you?”
The sky will be the same color all day,
so it’s difficult to tell the exact time.
Could be nine or noon or 4:30.
People hate days like this,
but Winter relishes them, revels in them. Nothing comforts him more than an oppressively slate gray sky.
“I scheduled my favorite sky today but I can’t enjoy it. I think I’m getting sick.” He summons up another storm and accidentally drops it, this time on New Orleans.
“You’re getting sloppy, old man,” she says flatly. Winter is blustering and aggressive and gets on The Wind’s nerves when they have to spend this much time together.
She arches her back and sighs in irritation, disturbing the surrounding fauna. From the canopy above erupts a cacophonous flurry, jarred from their roosting place and screaming into the air: cedar waxwings and white-crowned sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, mourning doves and a lone red shouldered hawk, which arcs above the rest eying them hungrily. It selects a small sparrow and abruptly knifes down toward it, effortlessly slicing the sky in two.
Winter and The Wind watch quietly, interestedly. It’s one thing neither of them has control over. Fate.
Evolution and animal behavior can be influenced to a degree; landscapes and eco systems crafted; civilizations built and destroyed as quickly and easily as drying up a river. What’s written in the stars, the plot and grand finale of every living being, that’s a different department entirely.
Winter leans in,
“My money’s on the big one.”
The Wind rolls her eyes,
“How on-brand. I would have bet on the little one anyway.”
The two birds, predator and prey, swoop and dive gracefully through the dark daytime sky, a carefully choreographed dance imprinted on each of their DNA since the dawn of their creation. The little sparrow is fast but the hawk is just too big. It will clearly catch her.
“I think it’s because I’m overworked,” Winter looks at The Wind, continuing. “The snow quotas were raised just about everywhere except my usual route, you know? The Poles are really starting to freak out and it’s like, I’m telling them, sometimes you’ve gotta give a little to get a lot. I don’t want to promise them a new Ice Age just yet but all signs point to yes. It’s time for another big boy freeze, Wind, I can feel it in my bones.”
The Wind is still watching the birds. “We can only do so much planning right now while everything is so unpredictable. My schedule has me fanning California wildfires this season and it’s a real drag. I didn’t agree to this project, but you can’t just say that, right? So I’m there, I’m doing it professionally, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a little outside my scope. Like, wildfires in the Palisades? I spoke to Fire and do you know it wasn’t even on her calendar? The extinction process is always so laborious and disorganized.”
The hawk is climbing altitude now, it won’t be long before it goes in for the ****. Exhausted, the sparrow flutters weakly, unable to give up.
Time briefly suspends, then a flash of feathers and talons and beak and it’s over. The little sparrow dies silently and maybe even gladly. She was so tired. Away, away, balanced upon the line of the horizon they both go, away to a nest or a cliffside to both fulfill their roles in the divine comedy.
“******* Nature.” The Wind has sat with Winter this way for aeons, since the birth of this place. She always bets on the small ones.
Winter smiles at her. “It’s been a long time since I had an Ice Age.” He clears his throat again and makes to rid himself of it, but The Wind cuts him off.
“You’re disgusting, I can’t sit here with you while you snow, it skeeves me out. I have a meeting with a weather system over the Baltic Sea that I can’t be late for anyway. Look, if you’re sick, you should rest. The next Ice Age can wait.”
She blows him a kiss and is gone, and the forest stills.
Winter is alone again. He begins the satisfying work of preparing for the evening’s offerings: black velvet darkness beneath a swath of gray expanse. An ice storm in the wee hours will see a glorious sunrise in a crystalline wood, the light dancing and refracting joyfully from blade to base to branch. He enjoys Wind’s company but doesn’t miss her. No one will lay eyes on tonight’s workings but the forest creatures and the celestials. This one is for them, and for the white-crowned sparrow. She deserves a holy funeral.
The hawk, back in its nest, gazes steadily at the slate gray sky. Night is coming. The hawk breathes in and out. In and out.
In.
And out.
This was a fun exercise.