“I don’t remember the last time it was this hot,” Alyssa muttered as she pressed the earthenware cup to her neck with one hand and fanned herself with the large paper fan grasped tightly in the other. The air movement was minimal, and each gentle breeze was warmer than the fires of Gre’thor, but it had more cooling effect than the dusty, motionless air.
“2388,” the wizened woman across the wooden table announced confidently. “Your daddy had just finished working on the Tillard farm. We had a bumper crop that year.”
“I don’t think anyone is having a crop this year, and certainly not a bumper one.” Alyssa motioned lightly towards the end of the road, before regretting the lull in the paltry wafting air and quickly resuming the fan’s mechanical motion.
Beyond the town’s small cobbled square, the humble avenue petered away into cracked mud roads that extended into the horizon, meandering through a vast sea of fields that twisted and flexed through the kaleidoscope of rising heat. Endless fields of stalks that once happily stretched upward with gentle, sun-kissed bodies now recoiled and wilted under the white-hot sun. The ground, the stone, the corn, all were bleached white beneath its unrelenting judgement, like looking through a shroud.
“Shade’ll come soon, and the waters with it. Always does.” The old woman licked her lips, but seemingly only left them drier than before as she reached for a carafe sheltered under the awning of the café.
Alyssa gave a momentary glance upward to the baking sky, lifting her fan to block out the bright orb. Long strips of perfectly fluffed clouds stretched across a pale blue canvas like thin strands of delicate silk, length upon length of gossamer-thin vapour, clinging together desperately beneath the solar overseer. Not one of them seemed capable of shading her cup, let alone the entire town’s precious livelihood.
“I hope you’re right, Mama. We could all use a bit of shade,” Alyssa said as her mother tipped the last of the carafe into Alyssa’s cup, careful not to permit a single bead of water to topple onto the baking table surface, where it would surely vanish into the heat.
“There’s nothing wrong with a little heat,” her mother chided.
“This is more than…”
Alyssa’s words found themselves lost to the silence of the cobbles as a sensation chased the sweat droplets up her back. Beneath her toes, a thing she had worried she would never see again crept across the bleached stone of the square.
Darkness.
Thick, black, all-consuming darkness. The kind that swallows up words and sense and thought in its shadow.
All at once, her body breathed a sigh of relief, and she tilted her head backwards with eyes closed, ready for what must surely be some blessed cloud cover. Her mind was already swimming in the depths of the promised coolness, lolling pleasantly in the emptiness.
She could almost feel the warm rainfall thundering down over her body, drenching her through her thin shift and cooling her skin, as it soaked to the bone with a welcome release from the arid air.
She could almost hear her feet slapping against the stone when she and her mother would leap about in the monsoon, dancing barefoot in the puddles with joyous laughter like two girls under the moon.
She could almost taste the dank, muddy petrichor that would permeate the air when the rains had eventually passed. A grateful exhalation from the suffering soil that would revive not only the roots of the crop, but also the weary hearts of the town’s inhabitants.
She waited, and waited, the fan slack in her hand, desperate for that first shock of cool air against her skin.
Ignoring the fearful cries of her mother that echoed against the walls.
Ignoring the thundering whine of the starships that loomed above her.
Ignoring the pressure of engines that cracked stone and soil.
The shock of cool air never came. Only more heat, dank and wet. Beading on her lashes, clinging to the threads of her shift, thick enough to taste.
Until finally, the air began to move again.
And the Gorn above her exhaled.
