Title: turbulence
Fandom: Original
Rating: G
Length: 200 words



Tide and Gale are cousins. They don’t
share a table at holidays, but
sometimes they mess around;
when they're especially rowdy, they throw
sand and salt at each other, Gale
ruffles Tide's rolling ridges, turns
them white and feathery, makes her
spit. Or Tide chomps at the coastline
while Gale knocks over recycling bins
and scrapes them down the road.

That's fun, but Gale's real sport of choice is hurling
tiny bits of grit
and crunchy leaves
at a hundred k an hour,
pushing edgeless ungraspable clouds,
pulling at our red roofs, our green roofs,
treating so-called permanent structures as a dare.

Tide is more viscous and invading;
her kelp never lies flat, always swirling
tugging this way and that. When
she has you, there's no ground beneath
your feet, nothing to grab hold of.

Even in the meteorological carwash
that is this town, there are days
where the sky takes a break;
the trees sway to a stop, the grasses too,
and the breathable world is movie-set still.
Tide just laughs and churns and churns.

Lately, I don't know what to tell you --
surfacing for panicked gulps and being
sucked right back down? It's no way to live.