The rain is beating the dust back into the earth, each drop a compression and upward mist, a small victory driving back the soldiers of this long drought. The dirt that we could not keep from our hair, our faces, our lungs, is pounded into submission by each liquid prism. I can feel it rest upon the shelter of my hair for a moment before slipping down into the roots to awaken the hypersensitive awareness of my scalp. As the small patters grow faster and larger I can feel it adhere to my face and neck like tentacles of a lonely squid. I wonder if he can feel the same soft tremors as they land on his coarse dark hair. I wish this rain could make me whole again, the way it mends our broken earth. But I am a shattered vase, no longer good for anything but cutting. And now I cut his heart, the heart of the only person left in the world who loves me – the only man who has weathered the storm.

I turn around and walk towards the boarding plane.

He cannot follow.

One day some thoughtless child or bold stranger will ask me, “Gale, why are you all alone?”

This is what I will say:

     I was born in Irony, Mississippi the year of the great river flood. The river flooded ten states, causing over $400 million in damages and killing 246 people in seven of those states. One of whom was my father.

When Anna, who had once been my grandmother’s slave and who was now my mother’s best friend and mentor, first placed me in my mother’s arms and whispered, “Now isn’t such a precious one the best thing you could ever wish for?” My mother answered, “I’d rather she was drought.”

She never named me, but Anna took to calling me Gale. She said I had been the only gift in that violent storm that took my father. She also said I had a similar skill in destroying a clean room so I suppose it was suiting.

I was 5 years old when lighting struck a field near the barns during a dry storm. After a five year drought that had followed the Mississippi flooding our whole farm was a Savanna filled with lightning rods, it was only a matter of time. No one knew exactly what happened, but Anna told me that my mother had been trapped in the barn trying to save the last of the animals.