THE RAIN DIDN’T FALL FOR LONG. Maybe eight, nine minutes before it started to taper off. By then everything was covered in a blanket of glassy splinters, glittering and flashing as the sun came back out. Windows all along the street had been smashed in. Mrs. Rusted’s Prius looked like it had been hit in a thousand places by little hammers. Yolanda was on her knees, forehead touching the road, arms over her head. Kneeling there in a hazy pink mist. My love looked like a pile of bloody laundry.
A final drizzle fell with a crackle and some pretty ringing sounds, like someone playing a glass harmonica. As the clattering faded away, other noises rose in its place. Someone was screaming. A police siren wailed. Car alarms throbbed.
At some point Templeton had let go of my wrist, and when I looked around, I saw that his mother was standing with us in the garage, an arm around him. Her slender, intelligent face was stiff with shock, her eyes wide behind her spectacles. I left them without a word, wandering out into the driveway. First thing I did was step on some needles and shout in pain. I lifted one foot and found pins sticking from the sole of my sneaker. I pulled them out and paused to inspect one. It wasn’t steel but some kind of crystal; when I looked close, I could see that it had tiny facets, like a gem, although where it narrowed to points, it was as thin as a hair. I tried to snap it in two and couldn’t.
I walked out into the road, sort of sliding my feet along to push needles ahead of me, so I wouldn’t get stabbed by any more of them. Yolanda was at the base of the driveway. I sank to my knees, ignored the stick of pain as my weight settled onto all those slim, glittering nails. Nails. The sky had opened and rained nails. The idea was settling upon me at last.
Yolanda had wrapped her arms over her head to fend off the crystal downpour. It hadn’t mattered. She’d been ripped apart, same as every one else who hadn’t made it to shelter. Her back bristled with needles, as dense as a porcupine’s coat.
I wanted to hold her, but it wasn’t easy, as now she was a lump of brilliant, glittering spikes. The best I could manage was to put my face close to hers, so we were almost cheek to cheek.
Crouched there with her was like being in a room she had just left. I could smell her sweet fragrance of jojoba and hemp, the products she used in the glossy whips of her dreads; could sense that her light, sunny energy had just passed through, but the girl herself was somewhere else. I took her hand. I didn’t cry, but then I have never been much of a crier. Sometimes I think that part of me is broken.
Slowly, the rest of the world began to fill in around me. The whoop of car alarms. Screams and weeping. Tinkling glass. What had happened to Yolanda had happened from one end of the street to the other. Had happened to all of Boulder.
I found a place on Yolanda I could kiss—there were no quills in her left temple—and put my lips against her skin. Then I left her to check on her mother. Mrs. Rusted was facedown under an avalanche of blue safety glass, stuck through with a hedgehog pelt of shiny nails. Her face was turned to the side, and there were nails in her cheek, a nail through her lower lip. Her eyes were wide and staring, bulging in a grotesque parody of surprise. There were nails in her back, bristling from her hip.
The fob dangled from the ignition, and on impulse I turned the key to switch on the power. The radio sprang to life. A newsman spoke in a fast, breathless voice. He said that Denver was experiencing a freak weather event and that needles were falling from the sky and to stay indoors. He said he didn’t know if it was an industrial accident or some kind of superhail or a volcanic event, but people caught outside were at high risk of death. He said reports were coming in from all over the city of fires and people killed in the street, and then he said, “Elaine, please call my cell and let me know you and the girls are inside and safe,” and he started crying, right on the FM. I listened to him sob for most of a minute and switched the car off again.
I went to the rear of the Prius, opened the hatchback, and dug around until I found a quilt that Yolanda’s grandmother had made for her. I took it back to Yolanda and rolled her into it, needles crunching and gritting underfoot. I meant to carry her up the stairs to my apartment, but no sooner had I finished folding her into her shroud than Ursula Blake appeared at one end of her.
“Let’s take her to my house, dear,” she said. “I’ll help you.”
Her quiet, forceful calm and the almost brisk way she settled into looking after Yolanda and myself brought me as close to tears as I would come that afternoon. My chest tightened with emotion, and for a moment it was hard to breathe.
I nodded, and we lifted her together. Ursula took her head, and I held her feet, and we walked her back to the Blake house, that little butter-colored ranch with its tidy yard. Or it had been tidy. The daylilies and carnations had been torn to rags.
We put Yolanda down in the dim front hall, Templeton watching us from a few paces away. His plastic fangs had come out of his mouth, and he was sucking his thumb, something he probably hadn’t done in years. Ursula disappeared down the hall and returned with another bedspread, and we went back outside to collect Mrs. Rusted.
We put the two of them side by side in the foyer, and Ursula touched my elbow—just lightly—and steered me into the den and sat me on the couch. She went to make tea and left me staring at a television that didn’t work. The power was out all over Boulder. When she came back, she had a mug of Irish Breakfast for me and her laptop, running off the battery. Her modem was down, but she was able to get Internet through her cell signal. She put the computer on the coffee table in front of me. I didn’t move till after dark.