centre of the universe - the dreaming: Scirocco

07/13/2008: "Scirocco" "You're being unreasonable," Marek told her, as he dusted the cobwebs from her hair. "There's no reason you need to sit in the root cellar."

"You don't know. You didn't hear the story. When the clouds blow in from the southeast like that, all green and black, it means a tornado is coming. A *tornado*, Marek. And where would you be? Sixteen miles away, selling your barley for half of what it's worth, or taking the stallion out to stud? And where would that leave me? Lifted from the whiskers of this prairie and left for dead among the cinders and the splinters and the dust!"

He sighed and sat heavily in the wide wooden chair beside the stove. He toyed with the idea of telling her, then thought better of it, knowing his words would only fuel this madness. Instead he watched as she wiped her hands on her apron and smoothed her hair from her face. She lifted the towel from the bread rising on the table.

"You don't understand the wind like I do," she stated flatly. Behind her, Marek couldn't suppress a smile; he just barely managed to stifle his laughter. "My father was a fisherman. He knew the wind better than most men know their own hands. He survived three nor'easters; he knew the wind. But even he didn't know of a storm that would take your house clean across the flat land and dash it to smithereens in a farmer's field. Emily Turgeon said she saw a tornado once, looked like it was hunting a man. It left three barns in her yard standing, and the chicken coop, where she was gathering eggs when it came, but it took her house clean off its foundation."

But Marek had known her father; he'd met him three times.

"Blow, ye winds, Blow" "Sussuration"

2 Comments

The Ms. S , on Monday, 14th July:

More, please.

Der Kaptin , on Monday, 14th July:

It occurred to him to wonder if she'd been plagued by these tornado dreams prior to his presence in her life, or if she was, on some deeper level that she didn't seem to be consciously aware of, tuning in to his truer nature. Our dreams are so often nudges in our own ribs to acknowledge something we actually do already know. Certainly, as a sailor's daughter, she had been sensitized to the wind. But to what depth might that have occurred?

Perhaps she contained some measure of the tempest in her own soul, and that's what had drawn him to her, the sense of a kindred spirit, a completion of sorts of the cycle of as-above-so-below. Their stormy natures responding to each other, finding in their common sensibility what version of home was possible once she'd left the house of her father.

Marek cracked a rueful grin when he allowed himself the memory that he had met her father on the sea and, indeed, even encountered her as a Pippi-pig-tailed gum-booted lass herself. A more chapped-cheeked salt-codded, bilge-spattered family he'd never crossed paths with. But what could have driven her, against the prevailing wind, from the Rock to this homestead, where water got no bigger than a temporary spring-time slough? His face froze as a further fragment of the past flashing through his mind - a vision of her father fighting for his life in a Marek-sized gale, looking up into the blasted heavens with knowing eyes, eyes that were bidding farewell to the sea and the sky and to his daughter waiting trustingly at home for his return. Eyes that, in that moment, looked clearly and somberly at Marek himself, so rare an occurrence, so startling, that it caused the god to react by slapping up a wave full double the size of all others in response...

Perhaps his fetching up here on her landlocked shores wasn't the happenstance it had first seemed to him. He began to see why he was here, though he could fairly hear Loki's mocking voice buzzing around his head like a dust devil.

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