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Weather - Second Prize Winner
Our second prize winner is Mark Tomlinson of Formby, Merseyside. A truly original approach to the theme, well written and showing excellent characterisation.
August
November decided to take a summer holiday and came to visit August. He was very excited as he had never been that far before. Everything was wonderful and new and beguiling. For a start the sun rose at five thirty in the morning and shone until almost ten at night! November, who often had to wait until nine am for the first real glimpse of a ray, was entranced.
Then there were the trees.
November stood that first day, wide eyed and open-mouthed in a forest he thought he knew well. In his mind’s eye he could see spiky, bare branches rattling in his cold winds and could hardly equate that sight with the verdant expanse around him. He trailed his long cold fingers across broad, soft green leaves, swept his feet through drifts of flowers and filled his raw, red nose with the warm scents of growing things and the promise of ripe harvests. Then there were the birds, why did they not sing so loudly to him? Why were there so many of them?
Tears stung his eyes. This was life he thought, this was real life.
August was not pleased. She was not, by nature, inhospitable. Far from it in fact. Her reputation for warmth was well known. It was just that there were... limits. It was all very well allowing July to stand beside her for a while and it was only neighbourly to grant September a fortnight or so of mellow Indian summer to gather in the crops.
But November!
She could hardly believe her eyes when she saw him on her threshold; stick thin, grey-brown and radiating cold and damp with a pathetic smile on his pinched face and a valise in his twiggy fingers. He was in before she had time to react or object.
She told July that this was the thin end of the wedge. November would have to go. What if he went back to his environs and started telling his neighbours about the summer place? Would December want to come along next or – perish the thought – February!
August shuddered.
It was easier than she thought it would be. November spent his days mooning about the place smelling flowers and trying to entice swallows to land in his hands. His usual sharpness was entirely absent. One particularly glorious morning she suggested he would enjoy the sight of a certain golden valley of wheat; harvest mice on every stalk and a full complement of twittering and cooing birds. It wasn’t far, just to the top of a nearby crag. He actually wept with gratitude and scampered up the slope at her side like April. So undignified she thought.
When they reached the crest of the hill August draped her soft, scented stole over November’s head and breathed into his knot-hole ear that the surprise would be the greater this way, all the time steering him to the edge of the cliff.
‘I’ve never been so happy’ November rasped from beneath the stole.
‘Nor shall you be again’ August replied and pushed his narrow back very hard.
He made a brief, startled sound and plummeted many hundreds of feet into a deep crevasse lined with sharp, splintering spires of flint.
August is a wicked month.
She fled down the hill and left the valley to find what light it could, she would not visit that place again.
The enormity of her action dawned on her as September hove into view. She would have to make sure nobody found out. So it was that August wrapped herself in November’s discarded shroud and stepped up to take his place. She tried to be all that he had been but she was a summer month and entirely unsuited to the task. She simply could not muster up the cold. The best she could do was rain. She got rain down to a fine art in November.
Warm, damp, rain.
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