Hope Springs

Mayor could feel the storm coming as soon as he woke up this morning. By noon the grey clouds overhead were thickening and growing dark. Now, in the late afternoon, he had felt an undeniable urge to walk out here, to the edge of town, and see with his eyes what he already knew in his bones.

He crouched down in the dust at the edge of the main road leading into Hope Springs and retrieved a handful of something so small and so smooth it couldn't rightly be called dirt anymore. When was the last rain? Not since the turn of the year, he knew that, but how long before that? Despite the best efforts of the records keepers in the town hall, it was getting harder and harder to keep track of the passage of time. They'd known for a long time now that the days and nights were longer than they were in the older days. And they'd been sure that there were now not just more hours in the day but more days from one year-end to the next, but the records . . . something was wrong.

He stood up, shifting his weight from the front of his square-toed boots to the rounded, well-worn heels. Slowly he began to let the handful of impossibly-dry dust slip from his grasp. Anyone watching might see him trying to judge the direction the wind was blowing, it had become unnaturally calm in the last few hours, but he was doing this simply out of habit. There was no wind and the angry purple sky toward Pile of Bones told him all he needed to know about what their immediate future held.

The dust gone from his hand, he brushed the last of it off with two quick slapping motions. The old man imagined he could feel his calloused palms cracking, the dust having leeched the last bits of moisture out of his skin, as he slipped them back into the pockets of his worn trousers. He stood there a moment longer, looking longingly at the clouds, whispering a silent prayer to the Old Gods that it would bring rain and knowing there would be nothing but wind and blue-white fire.

· · ·

Mayor stepped slowly through the batwing doors of The Reagent Saloon and stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness inside. Already the colour was draining out of the perpetually steel-grey sky as the storm approached and inside Sarah hadn't yet lit the kerosene lanterns, leaving the common room far darker than it would be at mid-evening.

"Afternoon to y', Mayor," Sarah called from behind the bar. Mayor squinted, hoping to make out some detail of the woman, but failed. It wasn't just the days and the years that were slowing down, his own body refused to adapt to changing conditions as quickly as it had been when he was young.

Maybe the world's just hitting end-life too, old man, he thought ruefully. Well, even so I've still got a fair few of these longer-than-years-years left in me. He started toward the voice even though he still could only make out a vague shape silhouetted against the startlingly bright mirror behind the bar. "Afternoon, Ms. Tunstall," he replied, narrowly avoiding a chair that had been pushed out from a table and left abandoned. The resident likely off to the wash, or someone would have already returned it to a safer location.

By the time Mayor had reached the bar his damned eyes had adjusted and he could make out the smile on Sarah Tunstall's weathered face. She was already pouring him a shot of the clear white alcohol she kept in stock. The crops had failed for three harvests running now and there was barely enough to keep the town alive. The trains had stopped running . . . not last year, but some time after the drought had come . . . say two years now, and supplies were tight, but somehow Sarah managed to find a way to bring in something to take the edge off.

Mayor didn't ask about it, he just thanked the Old Gods that she had found a way.

"Storm's on its way," he rasped as the alcohol burned the back of his throat.

"How long we got, y'think?" She tried to sound interested but her tone said that she was just making conversation.

"Evenin', I think. Maybe a bit longer."

"Mayor," Sarah leant forward, her lips close to the old man's ear and her voice nothing but a breathy whisper. "She's back. She was asking for you again."

He pulled back from the proprietress and gave her a suspicious, almost angry look. She bore it well, simply nodding toward the back corner of the room. Four hours from now it would be well lit and filled with the drunken singing of the townsfolk as they tried to follow the music from the upright piano, but now it was shrouded in darkness. Mayor peered into the gloom, unable to make out any details at all until an orange flare of a cigarette tip told him She had returned.

"I'll get this next time," he told Sarah brusquely as he stepped away from the bar. Sarah shook her head to tell him it was, as always, on the house. He nodded a brief thanks to her, turned on his heel and, casting a vicious look toward the orange glow, strode back out into the street.