(Another!) long weekend in Aotearoa New Zealand, so here’s your (very!) short-week wrap-up (or, just jump straight to Day 20):
Today’s prompt: “You come across a small shelter during a storm, but someone is already inside, hesitant to share. What happens next?”
Today’s music: The Wolven Storm, by Jogging Kangaroo. 🎧 Listen on SoundCloud.
The Shared Shelter
This storm was some bullshit.
I was out walking the fields, not thinking about much, and then storm clouds rolled in like that end scene from Ghostbusters. Unlike Ghostbusters, they didn’t just toss out a few lightning bolts. They tossed about thirty around, and then dumped the entire volume of the Pacific Ocean on me in the form of torrential rain.
It wasn’t cold; the raindrops were big, fat ones that had a little warmth to them, like this was a misplaced tropical storm. My shirt didn’t care about that; within two seconds it was soaked through, sticking to me like airport toilet paper sticks to the bottom of your shoe.
I was about a half-hour’s walk from the hamlet, so I figured I should try finding some shelter. I spied a lean-to in a field. It had some (now sodden) bales of hay beside it, but I couldn’t make out much else through the rain. I jogged towards it, the water hitting the ground so hard it seemed like it was splashing back to meet me.
When I reached the lean-to, I found things in a more complicated state than I’d hoped. The hay bales had been here a while, some having given in to time’s cruel march. I walked past them, and found that a narrow sliver of the shelter was still intact. It was also already inhabited by Sam and Maxwell. Sam was huddled over the dog, who was on his lap.
Sam looked terrified, and Maxwell looked like a drowned rat. It turned out that dog really was just eyeballs and fur. Sam shrank back as I came into view, and I could imagine seeing me from his perspective: a shambling, waterlogged mess looming in the rain haze. Was he imagining a zombie? I hadn’t met one yet in Hearthlight, but maybe Sam had.
“Sam!” I had to raise my voice over the storm. “It’s me! Can I join you?”
He relaxed a shade. “There’s no room.”
You know, the kid wasn’t wrong. This wasn’t like the end of the Titanic where there was a lot of room left on that plank. No, there was barely enough room for a kid and his dog in there. “Do you mind if I try clearing out some of the hay?”
He looked sideways at the slumping bales. “That might bring the roof down.”
“It might, but the alternative is that I stand out here and drown.”
“I don’t want you to drown.”
“That makes two of us!” I set to with enthusiasm only the truly soaked can muster, raking out chunks of hay with my bare hands. I excavated a sufficient burrow after about five minutes’ work. The downside was it kept raining, but the upside was that I wasn’t going to get any wetter. I’d been in drier swimming pools.
After I cleared a burrow, I slipped into it. “Where’s Dorothy? Where’s your mum?”
“At home,” Sam said. “I said I was going for a walk, but Maxwell wanted to go play in the fields.”
“Ah,” I said. “Did ‘Maxwell’ let your mother know?”
“Maxwell can’t talk.”
“I figured.” I tried to sluice some of the water off me. “What say we wait for this storm to blow over, then I walk you back home?”
“That’d be great,” Sam said. “Only… do you have a towel somewhere? Mum hates the smell of wet dog.”
Roll result? One lean-to, one scared kid, and two humans learning how to make space when there isn’t any.
XP gained: 1 haystack excavation badge, +1 towel needed, and a warm flicker of trust on a stormy day.
Soaked through by the storm but still enjoying the ride?
If you’ve followed The Hearthlight Chronicles this far and it’s brought you warmth, smiles, or feelings you didn’t expect… consider tossing a coin to your storyteller?
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