eerieindiana | Eerie, Indiana fanfic: Still

Written for Day 26 of the

31_days challenge. The prompt was "tell me now, when will this wild wind fall still"

There was no harvest that year. The crops were destroyed, fields of corn ripped from the ploughed earth and whirled into the air by the miniature cyclones that hopped across Eerie, zig-zagging through the town, never going beyond the borders. The topsoil of a thousand farms had been scoured from the earth and now rolled across the land in heavy black dust clouds that choked the sky. The people, if they ventured out at all, wore sunglasses and snow-shields and swimming goggles to protect their eyes from the stinging grit, and wrapped scarves across their mouths to keep the dust at bay.

In the laundry room of her father's house (because it was never her home, for all the years she lived there), Sara Sue sketched iron bars and industrial mesh on all the windows and doors, but her creations were graphite-soft and the wind wore them away within minutes of her signing the pages. When her brothers shouted for her to stop wasting time with her sketchbook and hurry up with dinner, she imagined tearing up the protective layer of drawings and letting the storm inside, where it would scour them down to bloodied bones. She never did it.

City Hall whimpered and huddled in the town square, trying to shield it's massive bulk behind the smaller, inanimate structures on either side. Tiny flecks of sand travelling at a hundred miles an hour blasted the marble frontage, drawing blood from a million shallow scratches, and City Hall cried and tore at it's own foundations in it's need to escape.

No tumbleweed rolled down Front Street, but beneath the wind there sometimes came the staccato clack of a thousand inside-out umbrella frames, the ruined and ragged casualties of the weather's first vicious onslaught, as they skittered bent and broken down Eerie's sidewalks. Some of them trailed their tattered canopies behind them, and some of them twisted together in an eldritch snarl of metal, and shattered storefront windows when the storm hurled them into the glass.

WERD-TV had been off the air for a month, replaced by an old publicity shot of Commander Cody giving two thumbs up to the viewer beneath a banner apologising for technical difficulties, when the wind suddenly died. Eerie's citizens, huddled in their homes with curtains drawn and furniture piled against the door, lifted their heads in the deafening silence, then cowered afresh as the detritus held aloft by the hurricane began falling on the cracked tarmac outside.

In the weeks and months that followed, the Eerie Examiner published several think-pieces about the nature of the disaster, including one from the Mayor's office which directly linked the lack of civic pride and sense of communal responsibility on the part of Eerie's younger inhabitants to the town's recent troubles. But when Weatherman Wally finally returned to the airwaves, unshaven and hollow-eyed and with stains on his hands that could, possibly, have been cranberry juice, if cranberry juice crept and crawled on human skin and never, ever washed away, Simon and Marshall came up with a theory of their own.

The Weather Series

Wally by