Reports From Unknown Places

We report on a windy July morning: it is some time yet before full light, yet the brightness of the clouds fills our eyes just the same. By our side, our expert is working hard to fully wake up, keeping quiet so as to conserve energy. We hear dew dripping from the gutter.

We report: there is a little bit of spare time at the end of this day, a few minutes that had nowhere else to go, so our expert and we took them. We cannot be certain, but we think we stayed in those blue hour minutes for days, while the night stayed unmoving in expectation.

We report: it does not rain like they said it would, and it does not get any darker today, though it is quite dark, really. Nevertheless, the singing beneath the clouds does not relent, the way the earth prepares itself for tidings of storms - whether any acme is reached or not.

We report: this is a day when the visibility of the sun greatly affects the temperature, and coincidentally, this is also a day when the visibility of the sun has been very ambiguous. At this point in time, the amount of sunlight we are getting just about overcomes the wind.

We report: we get a glimpse at the sky for a few seconds before we have to go tonight, but we remember it. The shadow of the Milky Way looms over the entirety of the vault, a shape built out of distant unknowns. Our eyes are not made for darkness, but we long to see more of it.

We report as we trod the sodden ground: the steady, brilliant rains of the past week have brought out all the worms, the snails and the slugs, and our expert keeps pointing them out in delight. Tree branches bend under the weight of the rainwater caught in the leaves.

We report: every now and then, we ask our expert to identify clouds for us, and they stare, open and close their mouth a few times, frown, and then say “I don’t know”. They always eventually find out, but we feel a little relieved that they do not know everything.

We report: on this diluvian day, we obtained a customary twelve minutes break so that we could ensure that the sun still existed. Once these twelve minutes had elapsed, our star dipped into the lowest clouds, and the rain took up once again, a little louder than before.

We report in the tentative morning: we are lead home by the light to come. Our legs are tired, but gravity barely exists at this hour. Our expert is giggly from a sleepless night, their blue smile barely visible in pretty pre-dawn. We think we are floating above our own body.

We report: the storm come by way of septentrional winds, and it does indeed feel particularly northern for a reason that escapes us. The rain is coming straight down in dark, heavy drops that colour the landscape like ink - a few of them enough to render us soaking wet.

We report while the sky is busy organising its clouds: after some rain here and there in the last few days, the air is brighter and cleaner than it has been in a while. We take our expert up a hill to watch the clouds take on the horizon, and we sit there for a very long time.

We report: time is steadily leaking out of the sky, drop after drop of sunset falling on our face. There is fresh-fallen rain glistening in shallow puddles on the ground, darker clouds to the west, and just enough colour in the sky to last us a few more minutes of day.

We report at the latest of the night, and at the earliest of the morning. Quiet as the ocean seems to be, the wind is big enough to shatter the waves as they come to the shore, scattering clouds of sea foam on the sand. The tide is ebbing, retreating with pieces of the night.

We report as the air is rapidly cooling after a hot afternoon: really, there are all sorts of angles at which we could look at the sky today. They are all correct, and they all make the same amount of sense. We prefer the one that hurts our neck the least, however.

We report: a beast of many arms is scouring through the heavens, losing bits along the way. All throughout the land, many such critters have spawned, all moving towards the same horizon with slow purpose. As a reporter, we feel the need to find out where they are headed.

We report as we are going through the rituals of the late evening: there is a thunderstorm skirting the horizon. Though there is nothing we can see yet, we can definitely hear it, muffled rumbles that have our head on a swivel. We will keep an eye on the path of this storm cell.

We report: when we saw the sky darken with clouds in the evening, we were convinced that we would not see the full moon tonight. It was not a safe bet, nothing ever is when it comes to the moon. Not only did we see it, but the whole sky was alit with its presence.

We report in windy conditions: spiders are weaving large webs between torn up clouds. The air is still sparkling with humidity from a shower, but these are no rain clouds - only passersby, which we can appreciate. For such big creatures, we are tiny specks of dust on a long path.

We report: the sky is wide open, and the sun is somewhere above our head, too bright for us to try and look for it. Bales of hay have been appearing on top of the hills, and the remaining grass underneath has been left to yellow in the heat. A bit of wind steals our hat.

We report as light moves from the sky to the street lamps: there is a patch of wasteland between two houses where heather blooms in the summer. Our expert took us there tonight, and the crickets could be heard from down the road, and the smell of the dry brush coloured the air.