The Political Weather

She knew Storm Justina was due to batter the city that day, but some appointments cannot be missed. Today is both hell and high water.

The steps from the metro are slick, the handrail running with rivulets. Grey cascades from the sky in layers. Delays, delays, delays on the station’s tannoys, and every passenger seems clouded with fury and foreboding.

She steps out into the street, blinking through what feels like a wall of water. The rain hammers so steadily it flattens every other sound into one continuous rush, allowing nothing distinct to pass. What stands between a puddle and a flood? Some kind of border crossing.

Her umbrella is inside out within seconds, spokes torn from their roots. The rain hits her face, streaks down her cheeks like tears.

People sprint towards doorways or cluster under shopfronts, keeping themselves small and dry. The wind is funnelled by the tall buildings, and it bites. Debris blows past - a day’s worth of discarded street-life swept onward by the biting wind.

She holds the umbrella down, tries to right it, at least close it, stop it from parachuting her down the road. In doing so, the bag looped over her shoulder slides down her arm, she flicks it upwards, attempts to stop its fall into the water, and as she lifts it -

- a blast of wind carries it up, away from her, she grasps for it but it is gone -

- the gust flips it, the contents begin to fall -

- it hits a parked car, propelling more of the contents into the street, over the car, into puddles and across the lanes of the busy thoroughfare.

For a moment she stands rooted, watching the small universe of her life scatter across the street, dispersed like people fleeing a checkpoint.

A car blares down the centre line - her glasses case hits the windscreen, the wiper catching it, flinging it aside. Under tyres, it’s crushed instantly.

She splashes toward the overturned bag - submerged, sinking. She grabs the empty shell and shakes it as if the one thing she needs might cling inside.

Her passport.

Behind, then in front of the car, there’s nothing. She wipes raindrops from her eyes with soaking hands, and dashes into the road. Emergency stop. More horns.

Her hand goes out - I'm sorry, I'm sorry!

Across the road, a man bends to gather whatever has landed near him. His trench coat hangs heavy with water, the hem almost dragging.

‘No!’ she cries, tearing them from him. ‘They’re mine!’

They stare at each other - neither and both the aggressor in that moment. She realises she is holding a soaking pack of tissues and a lip salve. There’s a beat in which she realises that, especially today, gratitude is expected.

‘So sorry,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’ And then: ‘A passport. Have you seen it?’

He shakes his head.

She turns, groans, it could be anywhere here now. It could be edging down a kerb, going down a - oh god.

The drains.

She crouches by a rising pool, probing with her foot. A few papers surface, their ink dissolved. Receipts from years ago, maybe, or stray proofs of who she was when she first arrived. She grabs them and shoves them into her bag.

A photograph of her children is caught in a nearby wing mirror. Their faces, creased and blurred by rain, look out at her. Hopefully at this moment, they’re safe and warm in the place they’ve always called home. She presses it into the bag without checking the damage.

Across the road, a figure picks something off their own car. Hardly time to see what it is.

‘Hey!’

Not hearing, or perhaps not wanting to hear, they glance at it briefly and throw it into a bin. She ticks through what else it might have been, remembering a hospital letter she’d kept, even from her own husband.

To think a stranger might have just picked it up and -

- but the passport. She needs to find it.

Wind surges through the street again, an unending pressure she is finding it hard to stand against. She thought she'd been prepared, but not for this. Her clothes cling, she’s wet through.

A couple approaches, heads lowered. She tries to stop them.

‘Excuse me, I -’

‘Sorry, don't have any change,’ says one. The other doesn't look at all.

‘Help -’ she says, but they have gone.

She crosses back, scanning gutters, pavements, the dark bases of walls, every inch of ground for a navy blue paper. She looks at the remnants of her glasses, crushed under the wheels. She won't be able to read but that will be fine. She just needs to tell them what they expect to hear anyway, in a language and an accent they like.

She checks the time.

Almost late.

A sound escapes her, small and sharp.

The charm given to her by her mother was in that bag.

But the passport.

She can’t go without it. No way round it that hard red line, those folded arms. She searches the street again, where wall meets pavement. Storm Justina can wash away the dog piss, but not the small-minded people who want to wash away the life she’s built here.

Could come back another day. But to delay - that just delays the not knowing. Makes her look unreliable. What's worse? Completely soaked through or unprepared and careless? Or, if she doesn’t find it - all three? So she keeps searching.

There’s no break in the storm.

She clocks a news stand. There, where the papers bearing today’s sensationalist, anti-migrant headline would have been stacked. There, where the political weather is shifted not by gods but by populists and their bureaucrats - peeks a small scrap of blue.

She lunges for it, grabs it, slips it into her pocket. The cover is soaked and limp, but intact. A noise breaks from her throat, half relief, half anger, something unnameable occupying the space between. Leave all the rest behind. And then like the wind, she runs.