Church Lightning

The summer ends, autumn returns.  The rain rushes over the grass, a percussion of water.  That sound is like a call to arms, a whispering arousal echoing through the barns, signifying the harvest of Mabon.  Death, the destroyer of summer, blares through the clouds his terrifying roar, the roar of thunder with its accomplice, the subdued rain, announcing the end of a season. 

I rise from the chair, drop all my books, look out the window and crease my forehead.  It's time to go running, one last time, before the purge begins.  And so I run, soaked to the skin, eager to reach the church, that I might ring in the service of a titanic cleanse, to wash away the debris of those small-town gleeful evenings reverberating over the months.  The rain is light, it talks to me, it brings me stories from the north, which the little drops patter upon my skin every syllable, drenching me in a foreign mythology, one I'd forgotten after a nine month's absence. 

The church is empty, I run inside.  I round the spiral stairway, making my way to the top.  Lightning ignites the oculus, his awful eye- not that of God, but of his evil twin- opened by the blast.  The storm crashes over this holy ground of incense and myrrh, these pews of dedicated mahogany bent at the knee in submission.  The paintings on the walls hear the sound too, the booming sound of this seasonal apocalypse. 

I reach the top, out of breath.  The rain falls over the town in sheets of wind, sending the leaves off the trees in a merciful release.  Lightning strikes again, thunder bifurcates the realm.  Little bodies of feather come fleeting out of the darkness.  They crow at the world below, a frantic siren annihilating the Earth, warning those on the ground to take cover, or run.