Rain Always Leaving

I cringe from the heat of the night on my face, pulling flittering hair behind each ear. The intermittent moonlight is a sparkler on the water.  Lightning and its booming laugh make mirth to the encroaching west, and I feel the blunted edges of consciousness whet against the oncoming storm. I am much too lucid. Ten bottles of a local pilsner sit soldier-straight and stock-still in the sand, and their clear glass gleams like fulgurites amongst the cat tracks. My cat prowls with the foolish courage of youth, dancing in the massive cat box just out of reach of the noisome tide. Up and down Superior’s chest breathes, and Fante ebbs and flows like a carefree diaphragm.

A coworker presented me with a tabby cat, and I named him after John Fante, the Italian-American author. He used to sleep in a crown beneath a stool in my room. When I left that room, though, my country-dwelling uncle had to take him. I let Fante keep the crown.  

Summer storms are short stories, and ones made frustrating by their insistence on cramming fistfuls of profundity into too small a space. It is better here, though, than those monsoon squalls of the desert. The limestone giants that bear their shoulders against the imminent storm remind me of the Southwest’s in shape, but not in substance. In Arizona, those piles of tired rock yawn a red devil’s teeth, and the rain gathers the baked desert dust and runs like blood; it’s Satan’s incisors into the flesh of the sky, a truant god howling in pain and thunder. In Arizona, god is the smell of rain always leaving.

Fulgurites form when lightning strikes sand, forming glassy stone that sits in the earth like ornamental root vegetables. You can find them around most any lake that is ever lit by lightning, but the Great Lakes grow a particular abundance of them. Even so, I’d rather not my cat become one, so I gather him up, and, in overt fondness, place him on my shoulder. I have two beers, one in each hand, one open. We are plotting earthbound meteors, we are digging volcanoes, we are lightning rods.

I can smell him, and I love it. That feral clean of the moon-bathed cat, his whiskers like white wire carrying a kitten’s electric current. I imagine he must smell expensive beer and a somersaulting storm; one on the horizon, both on my breath. I walk up the beach and he rests against the side of my head, and I feel him shift the beat of his weight against the cadence of my movements. When I put my ear to any rhythm, it softly thrums goodbye.