Читать книгу Twister - Genanne Walsh - Страница 13

*

Streams, swimming pools, reservoirs, creeks—water senses water. Molecules pull taut and ripple gently. Submerged rocks settle themselves and pebbles clack. In clear currents and brown standing water, in farm runoff and underground streams, microscopic life teems unabated. Surfaces swell and vibrate under the weight of bugs, twigs, and lapping tongues. Leaves fall, swirling into tiny eddies.

Patterns become insistent. When the sediment at the creek’s bottom is disturbed it surges, spreading outward—darkness at the center, lightening further out, with mottled, constantly moving layers. And the colors: browns and grays and blacks—but also, depending on the sun, shot through with blues, greens, even pinks and reds. What had seemed flat and negotiable becomes elemental—a witch’s cauldron; primordial soup; the end of things, or the beginning. A chucked pebble or fallen tree branch sets off a submerged implosion that replicates in miniature the supercell storm cloud gathering overhead—billowing darkness, the light refracting, its churning restlessness. Elements rearrange themselves, breaking open and reconfiguring, feeling a pressure that tugs toward the center. Gravity loosens its grip.

At Johnson’s Creek a waterbug launches into the air, leaving a fleeting concentric footprint behind. A rotting log collapses neatly into itself, and a small bird net flaps empty. No footfalls here today. The memory of footfalls: women and children sitting on a bank, neighborly voices, calls and laughter. Only vibrations now, and that pull toward the heart of things. And waiting.

When Nina Brown steps into her kitchen garden to turn on the hose, beads of water arc and fall—and even these tiny bodies feel the call skyward.