In the cloying darkness of the car, he listened to hollow, splattering clap of rain on fiberglass. There was wind, more impression than sound. City flotsam rode the wave-fronts of convective disturbance as if defining discreet (though interactive) spheres of influence. The wind (and its burden of city-junk) was an intimate aspect of the all-encompassing hologram: what you saw in wind (and city-junk) you could see in corporate boardrooms, in dance clubs on Friday nights, on church pews on Sunday, defined by pink-skinned or dough-pale matrons with pinched lips, or flamboyant brown-skinned sisters burdened with the flagrance of hats in all of the pastel colors of religious delerium. It was all the same: influence and flotsam, an invisible thing moving the visible world. Faith or fate, it didn’t matter what name you recognized. It happened in the ocean’s depths, it happened far below the world’s thin, brittle crust, and it happened now, just outside of the cab’s warmth. It happened in other ways and he could feel. He was little more than a dust mote, bestirred by invisible influence: nostalgia, as he judged it, catching sight of tree-shadows and raindrops colored blue by tinted glass at the upper border of the windshield. The tree was an old one: the leviathan elm of his childhood. He’d climbed it with cousins and neighborhood friends. He’d stolen his first kiss beneath its leaves, stirred by midnight breezes on a moonless night tinged with gin and cigarettes. He’d lost and regained his heart there, and now, decades later, he sat in rain-splatter and pine-scented car-warmth, heart pounding in his throat and sweat beading (ever so slightly) on his forehead. There had been reasons to leave, to seek out a life elsewhere. He’d done so, and now, alone (despite his lifetime’s companion) he was back: hot and uncomfortable and on the cusp of whatever confrontations the day demanded. “Are you ready?” He nodded in response to the most familiar and comforting of rolling baritone voices. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry,” his companion said. “I’m right here. He closed his eyes, seeking his companion’s hand with his own. “I know.” There were influences of another kind: softer than wind and harder to define. He felt them now and heard them in the soft accent embedded in his companion’s words. He stole what comforts he could from the moment, and listened (for a moment) to the clapping splatter of rain. * I have no idea where the text above came from…texts tend to just ooze out on occasion. As to whether or not this becomes a full story remains up for debate. All I know is that it was triggered by the sight of a cottonwood tree through the tinted upper edge of a rain-splattered windshield. I liked what I saw. I captured it, and here it is—on Easter of all days—presented with no postwork aside from resizing. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and as things slowly (very slowly) begin to settle down, I hope to catch up on everything I’ve been missing since the beginning of this very odd month.