He hates retirement, says it should carry a yellow warning. When I go round on Sunday he scoffs about his mates only managing a shower for Llandudno’s Gala Day, says he’d have gone full donner und blitzen, ‘really rained on their parade.’ He’s seeing out his days penned in the lounge, watching reruns of World’s Worst Weather, blathering about his 1989 Wimbledon washout or the winter he flooded Frodsham High Street. This is someone who could swell to five times the height of Snowdon, with an anvil top from here to Abersoch.
Mum left long ago, tired of him booming like a kettledrum, his gusts and squalls, of forever mopping up. I wheel him to the window to peer at the troposphere over Colwyn Bay. While he rages about ‘prissy cirrus clouds’ or ‘namby-pamby nimbostrati’, I nip into the bedroom with a set of dry sheets.
I make us a cuppa, wipe away his drizzle dribble, let him insist I missed my calling, could have been a thunderhead. He says I should have married a fluffy and trained up a troupe of cumuli, ready to pitch in when he needed back-up for a big one, or we got called out to cluster with the boys from Bangor to the Bristol Channel.
He’d been a meteorologist, flying weather balloons in Antartica, measuring tornadoes in Texas. He talks of his ‘eye of the storm’ moment, his decision to transition, during a South Pacific cyclone. ‘Why be the score when you can be the symphony? Why be the wand when you can be the magic?’
It’s pissing down as I leave in the gloaming. When I turn at the gate, Dad’s glowering in his chair. He throws a rattle of hailstones at the glass, spits out a couple of test flashes before lighting up the bay all the way to Anglesey. I sense the rumble starting deep in my bones as he gathers himself for one last heaven-renting roar. While he cannons around the sodden hills behind the town, I raise my arms, bellow the truth, let Llandudno know I’m a son of thunder.
Chris Cottom lives near Macclesfield, UK. His work features in 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Gooseberry Pie, Leon Literary Review, MoonPark Review, NFFD NZ, Oxford Flash Fiction, Oyster River Pages, Roi Fainéant, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Find him at chriscottom.wixsite.com/chriscottom