Quote:
It is late at night, and you are at home, contemplating various and sundry, when all of a sudden, there is a THUMP on the roof, as if something, or someone, fell against it. Outside, it's storming, so it wouldn't be that bad of an assumption. Going outside, you see something caught up in one of the highest branches of a tree near the house. Observation reveals it to be... a BABY! So... what do you do?
The water was slashing against the window, sluicing down in not rivulets, but rather rivers of moisture. She liked the rain, the silence contained in it, the freshness of it all. Even at night, it was like a secret room that contained her within its walls.
This contemplation was rudely interrupted, not just gently...not the awakening from a dream, but with drama. A crash, not of glass, but a more earthy thumping emanated above her head.
Her eyes swiveled instinctively towards the sound. Not as the raven tapping at the rain washed windows, this sound. The sound did not repeat, and she thought perhaps it was just a twig or sheaf of branches brought down by the winds and rains.
Worried that it would tangle in the lines or cause more damage, she took a flashlight from the shelf and flicked it on. Padding outside, hair plastering in the wetness, she peered about, shining the strobe upwards. There she stopped to stare.
A bundle of...something...hung limply in the eaves of the tree nearby. She thought a moment that it was a clump of leaves, an old nest, but the bright crimson flash of cloth told her differently. Then her light caught the reflection of an eye.
Whatever it was...it was alive....
Looking about, she felt the tree. Smooth wood, not climbable normally, and definitely not in the rain. What could she... looking about more urgently, she shoved aside the thought as to HOW something got up there, but rather thought of how to get whatever it was down.
Ladder. She had a ladder, didn't she? For painting. Earlier. This spring.
Her thoughts were running in short bursts. Like a runner gasping as they spoke. Quick, but pained. Ladder. Right.
"Stay there!" she shouted, quite uselessly. Running, she slid in the wet grass and leaves, marking hands and knees with mud and some blod from scrapes. Digging against the side of the house through decomposing leaves, she fingered through until she felt the ladder and pulled...
Sliding and gasping, she wrestled the wood and iron out of its place of rest, cursing and straining as it groaned from the ground. Then she looked with dismay at the latern, now quite unable to be carried, and grabbed it with her teeth, lugging it all back admid the same scrapes and falls.
By the time she was there, she was sure it would be gone, but it wasn't. She looked as if she were in a war. And in a way she had been. Sliding and slipping up the steps, she blinked at the bundle that reached out for her, false cloth snake tongue touching her nose as if in benediction.
Carrying the wet thing down as carefully as she could, she knocked her jaw against the last step, biting hard on her tongue.
A small chuckle was her reward, as she carried them both into the house and into new worries of pneumonia...
