Status: To be updated in micro-segments.
It's Only the Rain
Two Few
Mama said she saw it first-hand, that rifting of the Heavens that blackened the sky for a whole week and made her nocturnal forever. In 1996, a comet hit and flattened the ground in northern Canada. Taylor was too young to remember it. I wasn’t even born. As the burning sledgehammer of space dirt and ice streaked across the sky, it drove Mama blind. When it finally slammed into the Earth, the impact flattened the forest near our old village of Tungsta, as well as the neighbouring city where father had been posted, making rings of fallen matchsticks out of the millions of vigilant pines.
They say that small mammals survive cataclysm best, that they even survived the dinosaurs when that super-comet hit and plunged not just a village but the world into a years-long night. After our comet connected with our lives, Mama also became a rodent. She ferreted for food amongst the scraps in the pantry and squirrelled her babies away in the old barn, making us beds of straw in the loft where nothing, human or otherwise, could reach us. All this she did with the assistance of the two farmhands who had been working inside at the time, and so had not been blinded. When the first creepers appeared, they too came to live in our barn, along with their families.
Eventually, Taylor took over looking after me, changing my diapers and feeding and dressing me when Mama could not. I still have very vivid memories of his one good eye –the brilliant emerald that had been closed in a pirate game when the comet smashed through the atmosphere– twinkling as told me bedtime stories about the mutants that would come out since the impact drove up radiation levels.
We both laughed.
They say that small mammals survive cataclysm best, that they even survived the dinosaurs when that super-comet hit and plunged not just a village but the world into a years-long night. After our comet connected with our lives, Mama also became a rodent. She ferreted for food amongst the scraps in the pantry and squirrelled her babies away in the old barn, making us beds of straw in the loft where nothing, human or otherwise, could reach us. All this she did with the assistance of the two farmhands who had been working inside at the time, and so had not been blinded. When the first creepers appeared, they too came to live in our barn, along with their families.
Eventually, Taylor took over looking after me, changing my diapers and feeding and dressing me when Mama could not. I still have very vivid memories of his one good eye –the brilliant emerald that had been closed in a pirate game when the comet smashed through the atmosphere– twinkling as told me bedtime stories about the mutants that would come out since the impact drove up radiation levels.
We both laughed.