She looked out across the water, her head tipped and her eyes narrowed.  All she could see were tight crests, one after another, small collapsing pyramids of slate gray water pitching in the wind and the buoyed gusts of rain.  She was sitting on the sun-beaten bench, clutching a dock pole.  She shivered evenly as the rain hit the water.  She had a cigarette clutched in her right hand, soaked through and rat hair brown.  The water spiked and danced along the rain-punctured plane for as far as she could see.  She shook, battered by rain.  Finally, she made fists as she shivered and the cigarette was crushed.  It could have been dried out.  She felt it slip softly away in the rain as she let her fingers open her palm to the sky.  Lightning struck far away along the dome of the sky and she bolted for the house.  Across the grass and up the hill, down the dirt road, then left at the first mailbox, a homemade box with peeling green paint, skewered there like a fool in a pillory. 

            On the road the trees hung like an ancient tunnel, runged, intestinal.  She walked quietly, drumming up body heat by rubbing her arms rhythmically around her torso, her elbows strumming her numb ribs.  When the rain stopped, everything was quiet for a moment.  She could just hear the distant highway over the sounds of her bare feet planting and unpeeling on the saturated gravel.  She walked carefully, watching for sharp rocks and tending to the driven-in ruts.  She saw the house and started into a limp jog, her water-logged feet striking the road numbly as she climbed the small slippery hill up to the front yard.