The Weather Read Free Page A

window.
    â€œIt’s safer,” her mother says. “They might hear her if she stayed shouting. They won’t smell her. She smells too much like them. Safer.”
    Five minutes pass. Ten minutes. Granny Ma doesn’t come back up and Lolly starts scratching at her peeling sunburn. She’s watching over her mother’s shoulder when a part of the storm turns down their drive.
    Immediately, Lolly’s mother opens the window.
    â€œWhat’re you doing?” Lolly whispers.
    â€œThe roof. We’re getting on the roof.”
    â€œBut the boards—”
    â€œYou first.”
    â€œBut Granny Ma—”
    â€œC’mon, Lolly.”
    Lolly eases herself onto the sill, then over it until she finds purchase on the overhang above their porch. The roof slopes to her left, so that she can climb to the flat top of the roof. There’s not room to walk over, so she carefully slides one foot along the overhang, then the other, still gripping the sill.
    When she’s cleared the sill and her mother doesn’t follow, Lolly glances back at her.
    â€œYou get up,” her mother says, “and I’ll get Ma.”
    Lolly’s mother’s gone in an instant, and Lolly continues easing along the overhang, because below her the storm is getting closer and she can already smell them. If the scent gets too strong, she’s afraid she’ll look, and she doesn’t want to look.
    On the top of the roof, Lolly lies on her back, staring up at the night sky. The stars aren’t shooting like Granny Ma wanted. They never are. But they’re there, and they’re more than blackened husks on the ground.
    Lolly wonders if her boss had someone fill her shift. If it was the woman, or the boy, or maybe both of them. She wonders if her boss was ever going to actually marry the woman, and if so, if she would have had Lolly fired. Lolly’s pretty confident that’s what would have happened, unless the boy and his adolescent crush got a say in the matter. Lolly thinks maybe that could have saved her job for a little while, but she doesn’t care either way, not because she’s up on a roof with a storm underneath her, but because it was a really shitty job. She’d sometimes daydream about going to work for Macy instead, because then she might be able to slip a few free hamburgers or smoothies.
    That wouldn’t happen now, or maybe ever. Maybe they’d never have a burger joint again, all thanks to Macy. That Macy.

 
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    Copyright © 2016 by Caighlan Smith
    Art copyright © 2016 by Keith Negley