The Drought (1) [working title]

There wasn’t a story, this year. The children got restless and spent many nights out of doors, watching the skies. It was hot and muggy weather and that didn’t help none, neither. It got to be so that the Fathers and Brothers and Husbands would come and stand at the door and watch the young ones watching the horizon, just to pretend that they weren’t watching the horizon too.

Chores got done, just the same. All the necessary things happened, but without something that wasn’t what you’d call necessary but maybe was, it all felt dry despite the air being so full of water it couldn’t get wetter except by raining. And it didn’t do that, neither.

Some of the clever young things cut up sticks and hung some on strings and half-buried others in odd places among rocks and in open ground, where the wind would strike them funny and make almost noises, almost words. The very youngest of these clever young things would get excited by their almosts, so much that they’d run around yelling that the story was coming, the story was here. One little 'un announced that the story had come but had got broke somehow and they only had the pieces left. This was so very nearly a story that everyone got their hopes up in a dreadful sort of manner. But no story came of it.

Meanwhile, of course, the Mothers and Sisters and Wives were doing all they could to find out where the story had got to. Babies were left with the menfolk, animals were left to forage, washing and cleaning and cooking and carrying and planting and harvesting and all sorts of makings happened in a sorry sort of way or not at all, but the womenfolk were busy. First they scryed, then they wove, then they chanted, scryed a little bit more, in case things had cleared up (they hadn’t), they read, augered, cast, oracled, and even did a little wild dancing, though the Sisters and Wives were a bit embarrassed to be dancing wild with Mothers. Mothers, of course, were used to this and even found it funny, so they didn’t pay them any mind. But they didn’t find anything to tell them where the story had gone.