Under This Weather

• Chaseleigh Bradley, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2009

Sarah had been living in circle for three years. Not just one, but multiple chains of bring that were interwoven to form one great revolving cycle. At first the monotony and sameness of her existence had soothed her. Her fear of the unknown had whispered in her ear, convincing her that the path she had taken was the right one. Now, as much as she loved her home, the endless cycle of droughts and floods had hardened her and kindled a feeling of resentment in her weather-worn heart. The land had claimed her as its own and each beating ray of sun or piercing drop of rain filled her with hurt and pain.

Once she had been beautiful. Not only that, but she was the brightest student in her class.
“All the smarts to go to the city and to university!” they had said. The idea had terrified her. In her tiny rural town, no one had ever gone on to be anything more than a cattle farmer. That was all there was. The land, and only the land to make a living from. You were born there and you died there, completing the circle of life again and again. Yet she could do nothing but fulfil their expectations. She studied as much as it pained her to leave the home she loved. That was the year of the floods. Each raindrop was a tear that ran down her face and her melancholy permeated the air and dripped sullenly from the corrugated roof.

The next year it became a drought. With each passing day the land cracked and split. Sarah yearned to care for it, to soothe the deep wrinkles of the earth and bring new life. She needed and excuse. Anything that would let her stay and forget the frightening prospect of change forever. So she decided to fall in love. To her it seemed like the best idea in the world. He was hard and lean, from the city of course, with a strange accent. Marrying him was the next best thing to moving to the city and she might have loved him. Once. Yet as he slipped the plain gold band around her finger, the elders sighed with regret.
“Ah well,” they muttered softly “Ah well.”

The ring became the second circle to control her. She was married now and under the power of her husband. The first year it rained. Incessantly. She had to teach her husband how her land worked and how to rescue the moaning cows from the sucking mud pits. Her shin hardened and her hands calloused. He lost all love for Sarah. The circlet that adorned her hand became heavier and heavier with each passing day.

A year of drought later, there came a crack in the monotonous ring of her life. She was pregnant. Something new and beautiful had come out of something so tiring and repetitive. That realisation became her hope and with that hope came the seed of an idea. The lack of water made her cultivate that seed with her mind, body and soul, secretly and away from her husband. She rejoiced in the upwards momentum it spurred, as everything she had ever know had only gone around and around in circles.

So she sat that day, in her kitchen, mulling things over. The screen door banged in the dry dusty breeze, that swirled in circular patterns about the posts on the veranda, feigning lazy indifference. They were taunting and mocking her, laughing at the state of her life thus far. Sarah was twenty-one. Far too young to be trapped in a circle. Her hand gently splayed across the small mound that was her belly. The child kicked once, twice and Sarah made up her mind.

The circle was removed from her finger, the dust rings broken by her body and the screen door shut with a bang, bidding her farewell for the last time. As she stepped from the veranda, the last circle constricting her existence broke. It rained, it created new life and she was free.