Aunt Nicey: A Short Story

Stuffed between two pillows,my head was still and my breathing was warm and hard,with the prickling feeling of guilt covering me like a blanket.I ached to sob, but my eyes wouldn't succumb,they seemed adement on keeping my irises dry and stinging from perpetual burning.

As I crawled, I heard leaves rustling ahead of me. Suddenly, I felt drops of rain landing on my back. I continued moving until I couldn’t see the house at all. Then, I decided to lay on the ground to take a break to catch my breath. Ferns surrounded me. They swayed in the breeze as the rain drizzled down.

As the rain began to come down in an awkward fashion, as if it were

It was in the clove of seasons, summer was dead but autumn had not yet

“We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometime I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror and there is, as I said before, a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches (198).”

Once naming Doodle after three months the father and mother named him, William Armstrong, describing it as the equivalence to a small kite with a big tail. Once the brother of the story decided that name only suited a person of importance that is dead he renames him, Doodle, “Renaming my brother was perhaps the kindest thing I ever did for him, because nobody expects much from someone called Doodle.” (24). When the bird landed in their property, it was high up in a tree until it fell down, like how Doodle was high up with the name William Armstrong until it fell down by being renamed “Doodle”. The bird is like the expectations, since it was once so high up till it forcibly fell making it into this lower expectation-- once reaching high, great things now reaching the lowest of standards. In addition, the ibis started to flap its wings when it was in Doodle’s hand, like how Doodle screamed until his fatal experience, “...I heard Doodle, who had fallen behind, cry out, ‘Brother, Brother, don’t leave me!’”

The rain hit the window screen harder and harder with every drop. Well at least, that’s what it sounded like. Or, it could have just been the large amount of heroine I just shot up my arm.

Evening had arrived and everything had been packed away ready for its next use. It had also brought the grim warning of a storm. The sky was brimming with a dark shade of grey and black, making the mood eerily mysterious. A storm was brewing; it was about to blow, just like a volcano about to erupt. Then, “Boom!”. A lightning strike crackled across the sky, one after another. After three lightning strikes a downpour of rain fell from the sky.

Next, is the gruesome sound that these storms make when they are causing absolute havoc. It just makes you feel the utmost fear for those you love because you know something is coming. It is deafening to hear the storm at such a close distance. You lose all ability to hear being so close to the storm causing such a fierce pain in your ears. You almost wish that this world was not so cruel, to be able to live peacefully. Instead this world has so many things that can change a person’s life

The branches of the willows brushed across the ground with the slight breeze that carried throughout the valley. Long grass swayed lightly, bending over the path to slide across the dirt trail. A howl could be heard in the distance, echoing through the air.

As the light of the sun began to weaken, my thoughts began to disperse. The grey clouds of a storm blew in from the horizon. It began to rain big fat drops that fell so slowly I could count them. It was a cool rain, but the air was still warm. I watched people grabbing their things and jogging off the beach. Even my dad who was devoted to his fishing had begun to pack up his rods and bait.

As I drew near to the drop, the point where the road begins it's journey back down to the muggy, hot and annoyingly long valley below, I saw dark clouds gathering, and moving Northward, above. Lightning played occasionally, with the greenery. The wind began to rise.

Scuttling innocently through the twisting corridors I bore the same expression; head down, shoulders hunched, avoiding any eye contact - my desperate attempts to deter the despot for one day at least. Despite my efforts, there was no escape, as seemingly within the second of having that naively optimistic thought, a cruel, callous voice demanded I surrender my broach. Fear spiked, as it always did, but with it came something else, an alien emotion ... Looking back now, I see that it must have been the cumulative effect of months of torment that brought me to the realisation that at this point I had reached the nadir of my life. Deriding cackles pierced my ears and this time I recognised the emotion, fury. It burned through my veins, along with the memories of the past to form a feeling of overwhelming power. I met the daggers that would usually invoke terror, and calmly, I said “No.”

The humidity began to penetrate everywhere, crawling at its own pace, at the same time as the air became heavier, filling up with water, then the first drops finally came. Tapping at first weakly on the roofs, the rain intensified gradually to transform into a hubbub, at the same time as the ambient smell changed, a wet flavor of greenery spreading progressively. The horizon was grey, interrupted with green spots which were the foliage of trees shaken by the wind.

The sound of the rain, as it hit our car, was like that of pins dropping on a metal surface. The intensity of the rain increased as we ventured further into the eye of the storm.