Just Short of a Biblical.

For thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights, it pissed down, cats and dogs, sheets, buckets.

 

Jack was disappointed that it hadn’t attained the bench-mark of a biblical forty, but on the thirty-ninth night, at midnight, the oak tree in the garden came crashing down and he stopped counting the days and started counting the damage instead. 

 

He knew it was the oak tree because some of the branches smashed his bedroom window and the sound, unlike any other he had heard, woke him in a white panic. 

 

He thought the fourth world war had started, that they had dropped the neutron bomb and that the skin of the world had torn asunder. 

 

He realised it was none of these when a single oak leaf drifted softly through the broken window and settled onto his pyjama sleeve.

 

There was a second crash as the glass greenhouse disintegrated in the rush of wind that the falling tree unleashed. 

 

Jack waited for his breathing to return to his lungs and then, slipping on his slippers he went downstairs to find a torch. 

 

He placed the solitary leaf on the kitchen table which he had cleared the evening before in preparation of spreading maps there in the morning so as to better plan his vacation.

 

He stepped outside and in the lamp light he saw that the vacation was probably not going to happen, certainly not in the manner he had imagined. 

 

The car, or what remained of the lovingly rebuilt Triumph Herald, lay crumpled and shattered beneath the prostrate tree.

 

“Shit.”

 

Jack was a man of few words and now, no transport.