POETRY, NONFICTION & FICTION SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN. LEARN MORE & SUBMIT.
Hail on ground

The Plague of Hail

By Julie Marie Wade

  
Like snow but not snow. White, yes, so at first you’d think—but no, always falling faster and harder than snow. Pelting—that was the word. Snowflakes merged, but hail what—hail pellets?—stayed discrete, intact: a solid flood of separate particles. Oxymoron? Sure. But most things were, if you thought about them. Hail couldn’t blanket a landscape. No softness there, no slow accumulation. Hail couldn’t flurry either; it dented and dinged, pocking windshields, dimpling umbrellas. The hail I knew looked like beads broken loose from a chain. Not big enough to earn the title stones. That’s what my penpal in the Midwest called them. She said you could even collect the stones—“chunks of sky in mason jars,” like fireflies except—not at all. No stones for us in the Northwest, but pebbles, yes, filling an empty flower pot or puttying a gap in the road. Hail always came on strong, bearding the manhole covers with sudden stubble. Once, in a rage, my mother left us. She said she was going shopping, and we’d be lucky if she returned in time to cook our dinner. “Ungrateful!” she called us then, as she had before and would again. I don’t remember what we’d done or if we dared refute her. I do remember she left in the sun. My father pushed his mower across the grass. I jumped rope and made a diary note: “Mom was really mad today. When she gets mad, even if I think she’s wrong, I still get nervous.” Maybe there was lemonade in a plastic pitcher. Maybe iced tea stirred into cups from powder. Chips, pretzels, unwashed hands reaching into oversized bags. So many transgressions! At some point, we sat on cross-hatch chairs and admired the sweeping green. “Who needs a red carpet?” was a joke my father liked to make. Then, I took off my shoes, which we weren’t supposed to do. Some clouds, sure, beginning to creep in, but rain was always a given. “Only low-class people run around barefoot” were my mother’s words, echoing louder in her absence. The grass so thick between my toes, plush as I tugged it, plush as I let it go. Maybe that’s when the sky flickered its first warning. Not a sharp zipper of light, more of a flash, like just before a bulb burns out in a lamp. Then came the crash, and nothing was broken, but everything was. Sheeting, sheeting, the beaded curtains of sky dropping down, unfolding, then rising again for an encore. We ran inside, leaving the chairs, our tools and toys, garage door gaping like a frightened mouth. I remember the wait, low-hanging gray of early night, fast-turning blue of the microwave clock. Hour after hour. My father showered. I took a bath. The furnace flared on, then off, then on again. “Nibbles?” he asked. I was hungry but thought I shouldn’t be, knowing she had been gone too long. Maybe her car toppled over in a ditch, the door jammed shut, the tires wedged. No way to get out, no way to call. “I’ll heat some hot dogs,” like he wasn’t scared at all. Shivering in my robe, refusing my slippers, pacing from living room to dining room and kitchen: all picture windows. Why did they even call them that? Minds were for picturing, windows for showing things just as they were. All the early flowers bent back, throttled to the earth. Some daffodils gorged with pearls—yes, those pellets resembled pearls!—their bright yellow gullets full. Here, a tree branch snapped. There, a fence post trembling still. And no word yet from my mother. It was plain how the hail had come on hard, hailing the storm that followed. Hail as prelude. Hail as prologue. Then, the thrashing and slogging began, high winds and thick rain, sewer grates relentlessly draining. “Mustard, ketchup, or both?” Picture his oblivion! Puttering around as if nothing was wrong, setting up TV trays, casually mentioning my bedtime. Did he really expect me to fall asleep without her, not knowing where she was, or how? The house had turned too quiet by then. A calm descended more frightening than a poltergeist, more frightening in fact than her hands rattling a door, than her feet thudding down the stairs. Was it maelstrom or mael-storm? Either way, the maelstrom had always been my mother. She hailed, and we hailed her. I didn’t know why the words configured that way—chaos created, then deference displayed—but they seemed to reflect the see-saw of our circumstance. Hail-Hail. She teetered, and we tottered. She stormed, and we paid homage to her power. There the hot dogs, plated, wrinkled, stuffed into buns, corn from a can, Dragnet on television. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Joe Friday never tired of saying. When I said I was worried, my father just smiled. “Listen, Smidge, Mom knows how to take care of herself.” He ruffled my hair, which was nearly dry, and when that didn’t work: “Storms should be scared of her, doncha think?” Instead, I thought, I shouldn’t eat this, as I ate it—the dinner he made and the ice cream after—two big scoops in two big bowls, a long squeeze of Hershey’s syrup each, spooning up every last bit. And, sacrilege of sacrilege, we were laughing, too, because after Dragnet came F Troop and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. No more window facts but the pure joy of picture intentions. I began to forget my jitters, to let the knots loosen under my skin. Wind still whipping outside, trees still groaning—maple and oak, camellia and dogwood—the whole yard littered by then with slick leaves and hot pink blossoms. Gradually, though, my mind stopped attending to them. My mouth stopped offering furtive prayers. Body slackening, blanketed by an afghan, the love seat all to myself. What if it really was just the two of us? Permitting that picture, just for a moment, to surface, that possible life of daughter and dad. How… was there even a word… untempestuous for us! Had I been dozing long when her key slid into the lock, when her voice pierced the dim basement light—“I’m home—if anyone cares—which I highly doubt!” We bolted then, up the stairs, down the hall, toward the entryway where she stood dripping on the floor mat. Mascara smudged. Eye liner smeared. Blouse clinging wet and collar wilted, almost petal-like. Oh, for her skirt so heavy with wet! Oh, for her shoes, mud-caked and squishing as she shifted between them! My mother had us then, and she knew it: bearing our soft terry offerings, kneeling at her feet, so desperate to secure a benediction. “How much must you have loved the thought of carrying on without me?” Blasphemy! “Caught in a hailstorm, then washed out to sea! Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” Heresy!  I was crying by then, and my tears were real, but the source of the tears more ambiguous. Was it true she could see right through me, just as she always boasted she could? Not pretty as a picture, no, not once or again—but translucent, yes, as a window. “Darling, we’re just so glad you’re safe,” my father said, but the line wouldn’t land; the words wouldn’t stick. We watched them rolling away like icy caplets, frozen gravel, air-forged alluvium. We knew, and she knew, we would be hailing her, futile and heartsick, forever.  

   

   

Julie Marie WadeJulie Marie Wade’s new and forthcoming collections are The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), winner of the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, by Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach.

Photo by Ariane Kinde, courtesy Pixabay.