The Stations of Meridian
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The town of Meridian had three weather stations, though it only needed one. The original, built in 1923, still operated on the north ridge. No one had worked there since 1987, but the reports continued, transmitted twice daily at frequencies no one monitored anymore. The second station, municipal, provided forecasts for the county. The third belonged to the Vance family, maintained in their barn since 1954, though Alma Vance was the first to admit she had never understood what it measured. "Something else," she would say, when asked. "Something the others miss." She was ninety-one now, and the equipment had begun making sounds it had never made before. Not mechanical sounds. Something closer to breathing. Something closer to a line stretched taut and then trembling again.
At the football game, the weather station on the north ridge was in the tramcar, tethered to the steel cables with which it swung across at four-second intervals. It gathered data so primitive, so roughly contrived, that it was hard to imagine. My mother and father and sister and I watched it slide past our seats in the stadium every sixty seconds. I was thirteen years old, and we had driven together east from Meridian an hour before kickoff. The autumn chill was just severe enough that I shivered in my seat. It was cold, especially, on the rough shackour, where we sat high atop the twisted ridge, was cold, the energy draining away from one small collective body, a cluster of limbs and limbs and faces and skin whose warmth was gone.
"The sky has turned blood," someone on the tramcar said, and the boys laughed at him, charged up by the antagonism of the stadium, gay with annoyance. "We are a single body," the man said. "The Mute," some protested. My mother took my hand, my sister's hand and our seatmates joined us, swinging in time. I thought briefly of the Ridge, of Alma Vance, of the three auto fails and the three weather stations.
"Now the sky," my father said. "Look. It is leaning toward Meridian."
And it was, the sky having flattened suddenly, dissolutioned into color. It did. It leaned. The skyline broke, the marshalled towers of John C. House all the same way. My father tried to point them out, my mother agreed with him. Their bodies, from my angle, sloped toward the Grandcare. The ferryman's needle. The great tower of the school. Meridian was walking toward us, molecules falling behind in suspension or elsewhere.
As if I'd read a book, as if he were still alive, and saying it to himself, and murmering it to me.
It leant toward us, the tower of Tom Fracek swaying,◆ About the ending
❧ About the title