Reality is Stranger than a Dream.

I was asleep. Suddenly I woke with a start at a deafening crashing sound. My house was under attack. Thousands of hard, icy bullets showered down onto the roof, smacking the windows hundreds at a time. It sounded like large rocks falling out of the sky, increasing in momentum, speed, and force as they drew nearer. I thought they would break through the glass, the ceiling, the walls. I sat up in my bed and listened. Hail.

It had been raining all day, and a little cool, but no sign of anything like this. I blinked my eyes, wondering if I was just dreaming. I focused on the clock. It was only 12:38.

I pulled the shade back from the corner of my window to look outside. There was something so unnatural about the scene. It was nighttime, but it looked like neither day or night. It was dark in the farthest thickets of trees, but i could see everything clearly through an eerie greenish-gray light. It looked like smoke, transparent smoke, or a thick fog that somehow allowed your vision the sight of everything under it's blanket.

It was lightening that illuminated the yard with a dim, flickering gray, but the lightening wasn't flashing. It paused in it's glow, and held a cold breath, spreading over the trees and the shapes below them. It stopped and flickered out only for one small moment at a time to catch another breath of smokey-green, then it flicked on again, and stayed on, until the next time it quickly caught it's breath in the darkness.

I couldn't see the hail, but I could hear it. It was loud. It was a constant explosion of smacking sounds all over and around me in my little room, in my little house, in my little yard. For a moment I thought of jumping out of bed, and running outside to see the bullets, to feel the air. But the thought of the cold creeping up through my feet and into my veins, made me shiver, and I felt goosebumps rise on my skin- though I did not touch my arm to see if they were really there.

I laid back down on the pillow, and turned to the empty place beside me. I put a hand there, but felt only a cold empty sheet. My eyes were open, but I was almost dreaming then. He put his warm arms around me silently, and I moved closer to him. I could hear his heart beating gently, steadily over the fading chaotic clammor outside. We breathed in and out in unison. We listened to the pellets of ice turn to large drops of hard rain, and then blur into a soft steady downpour.

The sound gently faded as we melted together into a deep, peaceful sleep...


Written by Rachael Sage Payne ©

<< back   next >>