We roared up into the pass like a pride of lions. Chrome tailpipes glinted razors of reflected light that slashed the pastoral air. The late-setting summer sun had abandoned us to darkness on the flatland before the jagged hillocks rose to mountains inhospitable to all but bighorn sheep and lunatics before the coming of the freeway, clear-cut through the granite like a slash of genocide by the cold, brute muscle of cold-steel machines.
Our stink and noise cut short against the roiling wall of wet/dry, hot/cold and the electric tang of ozone cracked from bitter-colored clouds. The sharp cut double Vs of the pass had captured the summer stormclouds, like dirty cotton in a cupped hand. The sky lit up in harsh white sheets as if in warning that we go no farther.
We rolled off to the dirt shoulder, Mick and Bart and Bess and I, struck blind at least as much by awe as by the brilliant, flash-bulb-white light. Thunder shouted down the raucous hallelujah of the bikes, wasp-yellow and hot-summer-sky-blue beasts which protested incipient quiescence with temperamental growls and then fell to gurgling impatiently as we paused at the side of the road. Sweat prickled beneath our leather jackets and hard-shell helmets and I sat back, releasing Mick from the embrace of my arms and thighs around his body where I had pressed myself, leathers kissing, as we rode. I took off my helmet and unzipped my jacket. I could see Bess and Bart doing the same. The air, moist and palpable as a touch, stroked and pushed and pressed its way against my damp shirt.
We sucked in our breaths, tinged sharp and metallic, and gasped in wonder as the sky began its show with a fanfare of thunder and an overture of golden fire, ripping the thick air like hot knives.
A demand, issued in bolts of violet and pink, flung itself before us, shuddering the ground and ringing the air. A playful counterpoint of yellow electricity curlicued across the ceiling of stormclouds in a fit of giant, idiot giggles. Pink and blue and white and gold, the shouts and curses of the gods raced and plunged across the valley. The slashing fire of white-hot sheets flamed the entire sky in flash-bulb instants, gone as swiftly as they came.
The earth stabbed back at the assaulting storm with swords of yellow and purple spark, tall as skyscrapers, loud as warfare, and yelled its immovable defiance with a heaving roar. It flung hot balls of tangled white light at the sky in barking volleys, like electric gunfire.
And the sky replied with choruses of angry angels, screaming in quicksilver light that split the sky and stabbed the eye blind. A skreel of wildfire ran mazes in the clouds. Bolts of white and blue jabbed and slashed and the clouds cried, ripped open.
Rain like waterfalls and cataracts poured from the injured clouds, wept and washed and flooded down, driving over us as we stared upward. It scrubbed my face and ran down, racing over me, washing sweat and road dust from my skin, caressing the travel-chafed leathers, sliding cool as silk beneath my clothes. It soaked me through and I gulped air and water, gasping at the touch of the storm, as cool and strong, hot and impatient, knowing and craving as Mick, late at night, a dozen--a hundred times in a hundred anonymous hotel rooms after long, sun-cut days on the road. Rain like lover's kiss. I shivered.
Mick stroked my knee and pulled my hand to his mouth, kissing it, tasting rain and the last salt of the road. He locked my arms again around his chest and kicked the motorcycle gently forward, tip-toeing it onto the road, sneaking through the slashing water and the descending, diminishing argument of the gods.
Across the valley we scurried, through the pass, beneath the sky painted with flashes and tail-chasing spirals of colored light, the mutter of the engine obscured in the grumbling of the clouds overhead. Away from the fury of Sky and Earth, electricity running over our spines like the shiver of anticipation and the thrill of fear, catching in our lungs with the spun-steel taste of lightning and the quiver of thunder.
We crept down from the pass like lambs, quiet, washed clean. Toward the twinkling lights of the city ahead, spread like sparks in a dying fire across the ember bed of darkness on the plain. Toward home. Toward no more hotel rooms after long, sun-cut days, toward lamb-nights and the stir of thunderstorms beneath clouds of sheets and blankets. Electricity in lover's kiss.
This was a piece of "sudden writing": An excersize in writing from a key phrase or concept in a set, low word count or time limit. The concept for this one was "Thunderstorm; 1000 words or less in 2 hours." This is 775 words, and based on an actual event. It took an hour and 50 minutes.
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