The Weather

The Weather Read Free

Book: The Weather Read Free
Author: Caighlan Smith
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“What’re you doing?!”
    â€œGoing to work,” Lolly calls back. “Boss’ll dock me if I don’t.”
    â€œThere’s a storm! Store’ll be closed!”
    Lolly keeps on walking down the drive. She hears her mother running, rubber sandals slapping on the packed dirt. “Lolly!”
    â€œForecast’s usually wrong anyway. Haven’t had a storm for years. Boss’ll expect me to be there.”
    â€œJust stay home today, Lolly. Please. If the storm does come, if it does you won’t want to be out in it. I don’t want you out in it. Couldn’t bear that.”
    Lolly doesn’t feel anxious, for herself or her mother or the storm. She knows staying home will give her a stomachache, because she’ll sit around smelling Granny Ma’s rotting flesh and rotting ointment and the house will creak and squeak with every breath of air. But when her mother’s face and shoulders are covered in smears of burn cream that haven’t been rubbed in properly, Lolly knows she’ll cave to the smallest request, because her mother doesn’t even take the time to check and see if the cream’s rubbed in, and Lolly won’t bother to tell her it isn’t.
    *   *   *
    The storm hits while they’re upstairs, watching from the window. It comes in bits first, stragglers, slogging in sloppy strides down the road. Then the wave hits, and Lolly’s mother’s back goes rigid and she steps away from the window, prompting Lolly to do the same.
    The storm is of hundreds this time around, all dressed in ragged, ripped clothing, crusted with dirt and mud and soot and blood and Lolly doesn’t know what else. Their skin isn’t the right color and it’s falling off, like most of them, like every part of them if you look too closely. But even if they were at her doorstep, Lolly wouldn’t look too closely. She wouldn’t look at all.
    â€œThe storm spreads the disease,” Lolly’s kindergarten teacher told them, five eager, chubby faces who’d never seen a storm. “They spread the disease sometimes just by breathing the same air. And when you catch it, all you’ll want to do is spread the disease too, and you’ll become a part of the storm.”
    Lolly’s grade three teacher told those same five faces, starting to grow leaner, but not an ounce meaner, “There was a cure for the disease, a long, long time ago. But what it did, it cured some, and it made others all the more sick, and it made them into a part of the storm. It was the cure of the old scientists who created the storm.”
    â€œSome, not many, are immune,” Lolly’s grade six teacher told two haunted faces, eight months after the first storm in a decade. “The storm doesn’t like the immune, and if you don’t catch the disease fast enough, something in their dead brains will click to life long enough to say ‘this one isn’t getting sick’ and then the storm will overtake you, because if it can’t have you, it won’t leave you breathing.”
    The storm continues, wave after wave, trudging down the road, never the drive. The day fades, and for a while the sky is bloody and the road is quiet. Then, as night falls, another wave hits and Granny Ma announces: “I forgot my notebook.”
    Lolly and her mother try to ignore her, but she persists: “I need it. I need to check and see if Froggie’s unfollowed me after I deleted her comment on my post.”
    â€œNot now, Ma.”
    â€œI need to check. I need to know. I need to talk to Froggie!”
    â€œThe wifi’s down,” Lolly says, attempting to dissuade Granny Ma. But the old woman ignores her, talks over her, voice going shrill.
    â€œJust go get it then, Ma. Go get it.”
    Granny Ma clamps her mouth shut and shuffles into the hall. Lolly stares at her mother, who won’t look away from the

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