From Joy We Come, Unto Joy We Return

An award winning story from the Best Fiction of UCF, Cypress Dome of 2007.
         Additionally, a semi-final of the Laurel Hemingway contest 1997.

                                     From Joy We Come,
                  Unto Joy We Return

    The sky is a dark and heavy rock about to drop. Her light blue shade bleeds violently with grays and dark blues. I am kneeling before my open window.
    ‘You are wisdom. You are law. You are our heart, soul, and breath.’ Fattened clouds roll eastward, but she is quiet. Fields of rice, reaching across acres, wave in paddies drenched in last night’s rain. These fields flow under my own and distant houses standing up on wooden stilts. Crowded trains roll across tracks placed away from the villages and move chchch chchch. I pray long and hard. I pray to Mother Lakshmi. She is a mother to all of India. She will bring prosperity to this family.
    My whisper softens at the sound of rain and thunder in the sky, the sounds of a whip striking an ox's worn back. The giant rain is awakening. Silence fills the air for a minute. The sky is silent again. I know Mother is listening. My tense cheeks and forehead lighten. I almost smile despite the pain. The sky deepens in color. Rain fights its way to the earth. It fights its way through the clouds like water fighting a dam that is just about to break.