Longlist Saturdays: Meteorology by Daniel Key

When I was a little girl, I wanted to read the weather. The lady would come on our screen just after the news was done. The lady decided if we bring umbrellas. The lady decided if we wore our cardigans underneath our blazers. It seemed like the lady decided everything for everyone in the world.

One morning, during the winter, we were woken before the sun, dressed and fed and ready to go. We sat in front of the TV, the three of us, and we listened to the news. My brother always complained, he wanted the cartoons on, but mum never listened. She just let him complain until he stopped. We heard about the death of the king. They said the cause was a stroke and I asked my mother what that was and she brushed it away, her hand swatting the air as if my words were bugs.

So, I sat and I watched, listening to the words I didn’t know. They kept talking about the morning. They were all 'morning'. I didn’t understand that either but I stopped myself from asking. Then the weather lady came on the screen. She said we should watch out for hail. Again, I didn’t know what that was. Again, I didn’t ask my question. The picture on the screen that hovered next to her looked like snowballs, so many covering the ground. I thought that hail were snowballs that fell from the sky, perfectly formed and ready to be thrown. I was grinning at the screen.

Mum told me to put on my hat and my gloves. I rushed to my room and pulled them out of the cupboard.

‘What are you so cheerful for?’ she asked, waiting at the bottom of the stairs with my coat.

‘Hail,’ I said, proudly.

‘You’re happy for hail, are you?’ she looked down at me. ‘Take off your hat.’

I took it off, slowly, and held it in my hands.

‘Go on, put it away. You won’t enjoy the hail with it on.’

I put it back in its spot. In the hallway she handed me my coat. She was smiling. I wasn’t so used to her smiling then.

‘Go get your hat,’ my brother whispered.

‘But mum said—’

‘Get it anyway, put it in your bag.’

I grabbed my bag from my room and stuffed the discarded hat inside. 

She was standing in the doorway.

‘What did you just put in your bag?’ she asked.

I looked up at her.

‘My homework,’ I said.

She ripped the bag from me and I tried to pull it back but she knocked me to the ground and I burst into tears.

‘You liar.’

She opened the bag and spilt everything on the floor, my books and my pens and my little dinosaur erasers all tumbled to the ground. The hat fell and hit the carpet, sinking into itself.

‘Big bro told me to take it,’ I cried.

He looked at me as if I’d just killed him.

‘Did he?’ she asked.

There was a loud crack against the window. She smiled again.

‘Go outside,’ she said.

‘No,’ I replied.

She grabbed me by my hair and pulled me kicking and screaming across the floor and opened the front door and flung me onto the pavement. The hailstones fell from the sky but I was not looking at them. I was staring at my mother who stood in the doorway. A hailstone the size of a fist struck me in my head. I flattened out, blood trickled down my face. She smiled.

‘That’ll teach you to be excited for hail. Now, have you learnt your lesson?’

I tried to nod my head, but I couldn’t. It seemed like my body was no longer in my control.

‘Giving me the silent treatment? After all I do for you. You should have seen my mother. Maybe that would make you a little more grateful.'

I closed my eyes. That felt like the right thing to do.

‘Don’t pretend like you’re really hurt,’ she shouted. ‘You don’t know real pain. Get up and get inside.’

But I couldn’t move. The darkness behind my closed eyes was so pretty that I could stare at it forever. I stared at it, ignoring the hail that fell on my body, smashing against me as if I were a paving stone.

When I woke up, my head was bandaged. Mother was sitting on a chair next to the bed. She was smiling. Her eyes were red, like she had just been crying. I didn’t ask why she was crying.

‘You slept for quite a while, princess,’ she said. I turned to the window. It was dark. The day had gone by and I hadn’t even seen it for a moment.

‘I sent your brother out to get us some chips. We’ll have a nice dinner today, okay? We’ll sit on the sofa together and eat our chips and watch Winnie the Pooh, okay?’

I nodded my head. That sounded nice. We had a DVD of some Winnie the Pooh episodes that I used to watch over and over again. I don’t know why I loved it so much. I haven’t watched it in a long time so maybe I’ll never find out. Maybe I’ll find out when I show it to my child one day, if I ever have let myself have one.

My brother walked in the room, holding that bag of chips wrapped in off-white paper seeping oil.

He didn’t look at me, he just handed the chips over to my mother and left the room. He was wearing his hat again. He’d never liked wearing hats. He told me he thought his head was too big for them. But sometimes he needed to wear them, because of the shapes mum cut into his hair.  

For some reason, I can’t remember anything that happened in those episodes on the DVD. I remember parts of the movie well, the gang on the journey searching for the land of milk and honey. I never thought there would be a more magical place in the world. But the recording always cut out just before they found the place. I only ever got to see their journey, never to reach the promised land.

We finished the chips and my mother guided me back to bed because I was still a little shaky on my feet. She kissed me goodnight and tucked me in.

‘I love you, you know?’ she said.

‘I love you too,’ I replied.

‘But, you know that I love you, right? You know it?’

‘I know, mum. I know you love me.’

She smiled, switched off the lights, and walked out the room.

The next day I woke up, got dressed, ate breakfast, sat through the news, then listened to the lady tell the weather.

‘Put your umbrellas away today, the rain is gone and the sun will be shining all day. Don’t skimp on the sunscreen otherwise you might get all burnt,’ she said, pointing to the numbers coloured yellow and ranging from 18 to 22.

I was happy. The sun would be out to play. That day I walked outside and my dream of being a weather lady died. It was hailing again. It hailed all day. It seemed like it would never stop.

Daniel Key is from London, England. He has a MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck College. His work has appeared in the Meniscus Literary Journal, Quibble Lit, Free Flash Fiction, and Chariot Press. He has won the Cygnature Story Prize. He writes a poem every day.