Rain
Risembool is grey, and it is raining.
The rain pours from the sky in thick, solid clusters, each one the size of a small grape, and a single hard drop landing heavily in your face or trickling cunningly down the neck of your waterproof would be enough to make you thoroughly miserable. As it is, though, with the drops falling together in an allied attack, pouring, bucketing, so that the air seems clouded and scenery distorted, the misery is too dense to be absorbed, and it settles, gathering on the top of your head, down the sides of your face, in the folds of your clothes, on each individual eyelash; and it plasters your hair thickly to your head, and drips from the end of your nose. You become caked with it, choked with it, and it saturates you, your skin shrinking in the cold as your insides swell until you bulge with it. The rain is fast and hard enough to make a constant sound, a persistent clattering, and it shimmers and turns weightlessly in the sky in apparent flight up until it falls to just a few metres from the ground, when quite suddenly it collapses- splat- and shatters itself on the floor, flying in all directions in an aqueous suicide. The ground seethes with it, its surface softening, changing, rearranging beneath the onslaught. The water creates a second surface an inch above everything it touches, so that the world becomes double- reality and the rain.
Water gathers in hollows, runs in rivets, churns and sticks and clings. It soaks straight through your shoes within minutes, and after this conquest, your socks prove no barrier to it. It collects in your folds, on every projection and outcrop. It climbs doggedly up the legs of your trousers, so that your skin reels and shivers, and you feel on your thighs great sharp bumps that cling unashamedly to the wet fabric. It runs down you and up you and over you and through you. You become filled with it, and it chills you to the core.
Glancing up, you see the house in front of you, bracing the storm, hunched and battered beneath it, and you can almost feel the warmth and light radiating from it. You quicken your pace until you are running, all the way down the slope, and you are glad that she sees you coming and opens the door for you, because you don't think that you could have stopped even if she had not done so.
She follows you worriedly as you head wearily into the back room, questioning you in concern; you answer quietly, apologetically. She folds her arms and tilts her head to one side, standing in the doorway observing you as you wander around sopping wet, and she informs you solemnly that you'll catch cold like that.
You sit in the middle of the living room carpet and peel off your soaked clothes, one by one, and hang them to dry before the fire. She comes in to sit beside you on the damp floor and run her fingers through your dripping hair.
The heat swells thickly from out of the fireplace, spreading through the wet clothes so that water rises unhurriedly from them and fills the whole room with warm, swirling clouds of steam.
Author's notes: Finally, something I'm pleased with. One of my favourite styles when writing is using the second person, and I finally have an excuse to use it in "Colours" :D
I'm off to camp tomorrow, and will be away for a fortnight. D: However, I intend to do lots of writing while I'm there. :D
I hope you enjoy this. The next one will be something a little different, and I look forward to publishing it.