One minute, sunlight. The next, and rain poured in sheets through the trees. At once I was pummeled beneath the tears of a giant, the giant who lived in the clouds. Papery brown leaves kicked up with every step I took.

Through the fog I ran, dodging raindrops, sloshing through soupy mud. The sky giant yawned from his stormy acropolis, then cried and released a torrent of glassy raindrops. They buried themselves in fat, wet drops across my arms, bare to the sky giant’s might. I dodged the hugs of gloomy branches and crested the leaf-bedded hill.

Slick dirt and mud slipped into the fog, and I became one with the sky giant’s breath, cool and crisp against my skin. He breathed rhythmically, in and out, and the swirls of mist advanced and receded around me. I thought of the ocean’s tide, of mournful waves in the dead of night. At last the giant’s breath subsided, and I stepped through the fog. The mist behind me was like a heaping bowl of marshmallow fluff, featherlight and spun from siren sorrows. The giant really was in a tantrum today, so deprived of company that he was battering the earth with every last misery he had. Stay with me, he begged. We can play all day long.

But I could not. I jogged along the crest of the mountaintop, the world a ghostly fog beneath and above me. The giant was bellowing, his cry in tune with the rain: a deep, resounding HAAAAAAA over the individual plinks of raindrops and howls of wind. Thunder growled in the distance: the sky giant’s empty stomach. He must have a tummy ache.

Another few seconds and the rain receded, first to a drizzle, then only a few plinks against my skin. It became an intermittent tap on my shoulder, a reminder not to forget that the giant was still here, that the giant was still watching. The fog cleared for good, disappearing in the cracks between dripping trees. Around me, the leaves glistened with silvery sweat, and pale beams of sunlight lanced through the oak canopy.

So it was ending. The sky giant’s cries receded into the distance, lonely, longing. The wind would forever sweep him away, so he would never have a stable home, a firm place he could call his.

A flock of crows cried and soared into the distance. They, too, were headed away; away from the swirling mass of thunderclouds, away from the sharp slashes of lightning that tried, ever fruitlessly, to bind sky and earth together. But the strings always snapped, and the animals always rushed to their hideaways for cover.

Please, stay. Don’t leave me.

The final tears slipped off my arms and merged into the slosh-puddle-mess at my feet. The soles of my boots were soaked. It had been a brief storm, no longer than a few minutes, but it would be a lasting one. The rainwater would seep into the earth and nourish the life that would one day grow to hate its source, and so the cycle would continue. I would head home, dry my clothes by the fire, and by nightfall, be blissfully asleep in bed, those two-and-a-half minutes of life long forgotten.

Only the sky giant would go unsatisfied, destined to a nomadic fate that would forever leave him lonely.

Aidan Cahill ’28

The Indicator x The Student: “Nature Walk”