Thunder Tears

She watched aunt Emma-Jane clamber out the door behind her mother. The placid night air drifted in faintly as the two inexhaustible women lingered in the entryway. After ushering in a draft and an audacious moth or two, they finally shut the door behind them. Amber took a sip of lukewarm Tension Tamer. As she sat in the living room, the front door in all of its solemn whiteness stared back at her. She took another sip and returned its gaze. Lo, she sat. A meteorite with legs, striking a heat crater into the sofa. There was no reason to move. Amber had already said her goodbyes. Yet in the window, the rustling silhouette of tree branches caught the corner of her eye. She placed her tea back down on the end table.

They were beckoning her. A tinge of that unexplainable—urge, shrugged it's familiar resolve inside. And in the next instance it had pulled her off the couch. Amber hurried up the stairs to grab a pair of slip-ons and scampered out the door into the breezy night. It was a humid breezy. Not the most enjoyable kind. Still, any generous helping of wind in the trees lifted her spirit. Amber would be a donkey's uncle if she had let a night like this go to waste—or however the saying went. The grass crunched softly underfoot. She watched her aunt's orange lull of taillights illuminate the lamp-less driveway before pivoting and then zooming off down the road.

"There

she

goes—" Amber sang to herself in the tune of Sixpence None the Richer. Suddenly a faint flash of lavender snaked across the sky overhead. 'Thunder, good,' Amber thought. She tried to convince herself that thunderstorms were ideal for minimizing her problems. As great wars raged in the skies above—cities crumbling, peace shattering, the tears of the fallen falling to the earth—whether dragons really dwelled in the stormy heavens or not, someone else out there was suffering during a thunderstorm. She drew the warm, salty, haze into her senses one final time before trudging back to the door.

Inside she could hear her Labrador Retriever shuffling about erratically.

A tell-tale sign trouble soon awaited her. And no amount of dragon tears would make her feel less alone.