The Blue Skies Anthology

Part 1- Of Gray Eyes and Blue Skies

That first week of summer, it wouldn't stop raining.

It just rained, and rained, and kept on raining, until Bree thought that she'd go insane if she saw another raindrop.

Of course, she didn't, because it rained every day that week. And not the light, warm rain that fell year-round in South Florida, always vanishing and reappearing, the irregularly regular rain always accompanied by familiar, soothing thunder. No, this was hard rain, relentless, unforgiving, scary. It stung if she so much as stuck her hand out a window- which she didn't, anymore, because all the windows were locked. But she could expect that much from her mother.

Bree was nowhere near a stranger to thunder, but she'd expected it to be at least bearable, if not comfortable. But not with these storms. They were forces of nature, harsh and furious, with claps of thunder and darts of viciously ragged lightning that made her heart beat faster, triggering animal instincts that made her jump at every deafening boom that sounded.

For eight and a half days, the rain cycled: clear skies that, after sunrise, turned a blazing, brilliantly pure cerulean that gathered puffy clouds quickly. By noon, they'd turn steel-gray and cover the sky as far as the eye could see, threatening, beckoning, with a promise of rain hanging heavy in the air. The birds always vanished by then, seemingly foreseeing the torrential downpour that would soon devour the sky and spit it back out. The streets flooded, washing debris into the gutters and coaxing residents to stay indoors. The storm would circulate those peculiar tiny breezes near the ground, she knew, and the air would somehow be both in a constant state of motion and a flat, still bluish-gray that provided a backdrop both menacing and inviting. The sky was interrupted only by the stark, waving black lines of houses and palm trees, and the sharp, thin lines of the falling-far-too-fast rain. The whole scene was simultaneously two-dimensional and three-dimensional. She loved the rain, but it was starting to do her head in.

It wasn't terribly hard for her to know what was going on here- the sheer uniformity of the sky's color coupled with the height of her fourth-floor windows made it difficult for her eyes to differentiate from two dimensions and three. That didn't stop her from seeing the disparity, though. Or from said disparity bothering her, a small but annoyingly constant inconsistency in her field of very-three-dimensional vision- her bedroom, sky blue walls and closet across from the foot of her bed, the tiny desk she never used, her two bookshelves.

So, to keep from going insane, Bree decided she should stop looking out the window above her bed and stop practically writing a novel in her head about the rain- especially at eleven thirty P.M.- and attempt to get on with her life.

As usual, that didn't work.

Everything on the horizon was dark. Most people had hurricane shutters and/or no power, and the rain only disappeared in the early hours of the morning. Instead of the shifting, predictable light she used as a rough guide to the passage of time, it was the same from noon to the witching hour- the horizon dark against the sky, weak, white light filtering through the clouds until sunset. But there was hardly a trace of the golden sunlight she was used to. Bree hadn't known it was essential to her sanity until she had to live without it for a week, she mused.

The wind patterns down on the ground, she knew, would be wonderfully erratic, chaotic in that particular way that Bree had always loved. The entropy grounded her, in a way. Entropy was the only true constant in her life. She blinked in surprise.

There was someone outside.