Walking Out Into A Storm

WALKING OUT INTO A STORM / Barbara Anderson is a temptation neither of us is strong enough to control. Our bodies are seven years old again breaking into a dead run into an emergency which is everywhere safe and impersonal, past the woman whose baby was due last Thursday who watches us through her picture window still heavy bellied in her blue tunic and the elderly couple home from the clinic their windows already darkened to the color of the sky. I wish I knew the names of everything in danger, like those moist skinned amphibians, salamanders, who always emerged magically after a summer's storm. My brother and I collected them and let them live awhile in shoeboxes with lids full of water and wilted lettuce; each time one died, a sacrifice, we promised not to make again. It was said that they lived in fire, as here in the desert in the summer the dry culverts ready themselves for the water's weight. The Missouri Review · 27 I felt the abundance of this once when I went out to make love in the enclosure of a desert downpour; It was something to praise. Simply. Like a good cry after a birth or a broken heart, or a cup of water, cold, at the end of summer. 28 ¦ The Missouri Review Barbara Anderson ...