This might be cheating - or not. I've already written about thunder, so here's a little part of it. I hope you enjoy.
One
night in late autumn, the Mississippi sky split apart and a great deluge of rain
poured out of the dark clouds. It pummeled the side of the house and cracked so
hard against the windows I feared the glass would break. Thunder, boisterous
and booming, shook the house like cannon fire, and the lightning ripped through
the sky illuminating my room with a ghostly blue glow. I heard a thump that
came from the hall and sat straight up in my bed. The silhouette of a small
child formed itself out of the light and shadow as it hovered just inside my
door.
“Hope?”
I whispered loudly. In a flash of jagged lightning I saw her face, a mask of
uncertainty and fear shaping her chubby features.
“I’m
afraid, Faith.”
I
could barely hear her over the thunder and the wind that pried its strong
fingers around the edges of the screens on my windows. I motioned for her to
come to the bed. Pulling the blankets away, I revealed a vacant space on the
mattress and she quickly scurried up, the soles of her feet warm against my
bare calf. “The thunder scares me.”
My
lips found her warm, clean head and I pressed them against her curls. Her
little bottom nestled against my stomach and I slung my arm over her beneath
the covers. “It's okay," I whispered. "It’s just loud is all.”
Hope
was silent for a moment, the room exploding in another sudden burst of light
followed seconds later by the crashing of thunder. I felt her shudder against
me. “Daddy says thunder’s the sound God makes when he’s mad.”
A
sigh escaped my lips before I settled further into the pillow remembering that
he'd said that to me once, too. A long time ago, while dipping my hand into
Mama’s cookie jar, I’d pulled the whole thing down onto the floor. It broke
into many pieces too small to glue back together. A fiercely violent storm blew
in later that afternoon, the thunder so loud it seemed to shake the very
foundation of the house. Daddy told me that God was very angry with me for
sneaking cookies when I'd been told not to. I’d believed him.
“Thunder
goes with rain,” I explained, my mouth moving against the messy strands of
Hope's hair. “God's just watering all his flowers and trees. Maybe he was
lonely and the sound is keeping him company.”
She
shook her head hard, my words providing no solace. “No.” Her chin lifted and her
face was covered in shadows highlighted only by the brief and bright flashes of
lightning that continued to light up the room. Her eyes were large and glassy and
I could feel her body shake with the hiccups that come after a hard cry. “Daddy
was really angry with me tonight. Mama told him about school.”
Our
father's voice had filled the upper hall hours earlier after the supper dishes
had been washed, dried and put away and I was fanning a crisp clean table cloth
over the dining room table. He'd caught Hope before she'd made it to the safety
of Mama's pink tub. His words trailed down the stairs to fill the entry way as
he told her that if she wasn’t mindful, God would know it and she would be
punished, that God knew everything and disobedient children paid for their
insolence and bad behavior.
“The
thunder, Faith,” she whispered, burrowing in tighter against me in my overly
warm bed. “God’s angry with me,
too.”
“No,
Hope,” I quickly assured her.
“Yes,
ma'am,” she argued. “He is. I was
disobedient and now God’s angry with me. Daddy said so.”
She
shuddered again as another crack of thunder fell, rolling and churning around
us. When the last of the noise had faded away and there was nothing left but
the sound of fat drops of rain pelting the glass she spoke again. “Daddy should
know,” she told me. “No one knows God better than Daddy.”
~*~*~*~
Excerpt from The Color of Thunder
(c) J.C. Wing 2012
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