Needing Rain

I sit under a yellow sky in red shadows and observe as a small wasp of some kind swoops down and grabs a smaller wasp on a nearby blade of grass.  The larger wasp pins the smaller to the blade. I cannot tell if the pair are braced for the death of the smaller wasp, or if they are copulating.

What’s the difference in time extended?

The shoe left yesterday to dry on our front walk this morning cradles a sprawling web and a leggy spider.  I am not fond of spiders—especially shoe inhabiting spiders.  But I leave the spider undisturbed.  I lack the energy to challenge the spider.

High above, the sun is ochre, dulled by the haze of forest fires burning through the mountains to our west.  Over the last few weeks, several fires have stumbled through the timbered ravines there.  Some have flared dramatically and destroyed homes.

20 pounds of housecat emerges from the tall, cured brome grass just outside my fence and saunters through the yard toward me while heat waves warp the mountains behind him.  I watch the cat for a while.  Slow and deliberate.  Sniffing a new scent left on the concrete, my shoe, the spider in the shoe.  All around him, things desire water.  The standing needle-and-thread grass.  The more distant bull pine.  The rolling sage hills.  The vaulting, grizzled sky.  All thirst for water.

The cat flops down beside me, deflates as only cats can.

A yellow sky is never good.  This kind of sky is no canvas upon which we might fix any of our pretty ideas.  An orange sun is no gem.

I have over 100 television channels to watch.  Over a dozen rape and murder channels.  Shopping channels.  Naked people channels.  Cartoons.  Countless channels with politicians promising some kind of nebulous change.

Not the change I want.  I want something to change in this hot, empty sky.  So I watch, waiting for the arrival of just one heroic raincloud.

--Mitchell Hegman