Summer Stories 2025: ‘Movement’
It’s a beautiful morning in early summer, breezy and not too warm yet, the sky a smooth blue stone behind the narrow spears of the pines, the garden with its fresh green growth damp with dew and already warming in the early sun. Sofia stands in her too large socks in the yellow and white kitchen, a child still at 14, and, emboldened by her mother’s question – How are you, Sofe? – suddenly tells her mother the truth about what her stepfather Tom is doing to her.
She can feel an ugliness gather behind the weight of her words – all of the shame and sorrow and guilt at what she, as a child, hasn’t been able to avoid or control or manage, all that she has tried and failed to normalize to herself even though her body told her, firmly, immediately, This isn’t right, this is wrong – and she finds herself now too afraid and too hopeful of how her mother will respond.
Her mother has gone very still. The eggs hiss in the pan. Sofia, her admission finished, peers into her mother’s face with desperation. For a moment, it seems her mother will speak to her, but then she slowly turns away from Sofia and takes up the spatula.
She begins to poke at the eggs.
She asks Sofia, “Could you please go out to the garden and snip some parsley?”
Sofia at first feels relieved to be given a task, to be seen as useful and trustworthy, as if the grave news she has just reported is of no consequence whatsoever. Part of her wants to believe that what Tom has done means nothing – this is what she has been telling herself through all of this, anyway, that is means nothing, that she (consequently) means nothing – if her mother responds to the act with indifference, then perhaps this nothingness is valid.
But when she moves into the garden, she senses something amiss. Her entire body seems to be listening for what isn’t there.
And then she realizes it’s not just her own inner workings that have quieted. Around her the trees stand motionless. Even the blades of grass are unnaturally still. The pink annuals her mother has planted and the lilacs lining the yard are drained of vitality and movement. The sweet fragrance of the blossoms does not reach her, nor does the smell of the parsley when she severs it with the kitchen shears. When Sofia rises from her crouch and looks up, she sees that the scant clouds are pinned to the pale blue theatre of the sky, secured in place, no longer scudding along, no longer shapeshifting with their usual endless mercuriality. The air has become stifling, claustrophobic and dry. Sofia moves back into the house with a sense of foreboding.
“Mom, something is wrong. The wind’s stopped. Like, fully stopped. The air isn’t moving at all.”
Her mother, pulling plates noisily down from the cupboards, says only, “Sofia, you’ve always had a flair for the dramatic.”
Sofia is unsure what her mother means by this. She’s been called stubborn, and sensitive, but “dramatic” is new. Instead of arguing with her mother as she wants to, she helps her by taking the cutlery out of the drawer and placing forks and knives beside the plates. Only two settings. Tom isn’t there – he’s traveling for work, as he frequently does, and those are always the best times, when he’s away. It’s why she felt safe enough to tell her mother – finally – all he’s done.
The plates and silverware now arranged, the eggs set in their hot skillet on a trivet in the center of the table, Sofia’s mother makes a sad little noise in her throat.
“The day’s hardly begun and I’m already exhausted,” she says, to Sofia, to no one.
Sofia marvels at her mother’s evasiveness. What did Sofia expect? Perhaps this is why it took so long for her to say the words, the certainty that she would not so much be disbelieved as ignored.
“Mom,” she says, and her mother’s dark eyes snap up to hers.
Sofia realizes, feeling herself split in two, She’s angry with me.
Then her mother says, rolling her gaze to the big bay window behind Sofia, “You’re right. Something’s wrong.”
Her mother stands from her chair, moves to the back door, slides outside. Through the window, Sofia watches her mother lick a finger, hold it upright, wait, her face puzzled.
Sofia holds her own palm in front of her mouth and attempts to blow air out from her lungs. Her palm registers nothing, as if her own wind has been swallowed up by some unseen force, invisible and everywhere and hungrier than them all.
“There’s no wind anywhere,” her mother says, hurrying now through the house to the den so she can switch on the television.
It’s already appearing on the world’s news outlets, on the day’s podcasts, on social media. Scientists and pundits and religious leaders and government officials all speaking to the sudden vanquished winds, a result of climate change or God’s wrath or an interstellar explosion that has ended the Earth’s rotation or disrupted its atmosphere, or, as one climatologist posits, an impending and world-ruining storm, sucking all of the air into itself not unlike a tidal wave sucks in water before it blasts the land with a gale of destruction. The phenomenon is given monikers: The Flat Calm, The Stillness, The Death. The local grocery stores swell with people fighting for cans of beans, jars of peaches, crackers, toilet paper; already consumers are aware that global food production is at risk. Shelf-stable foods are in short supply.
In the ensuing days, Sofia’s mother roosts in the den, eating her microwaved meals in silence and flipping through all of the news channels, and Sofia contacts her friends and exchanges messages like This is so freaky and My skin is like so dry already and We keep turning on fans and they spin but there’s no air coming out and Am I going to die without ever having been felt up? but she mostly just feels outside of herself, like she is both intently watching what’s happening and also floating outside of it all, which is how she’s felt for most of her life, wanting to care but not quite caring, not really, because caring would mean a certain type of annihilation. She looks at the calendar and notes Tom’s scheduled return. She waits for her mother to say something to her, anything at all. Sometimes she feels her mother watching her but when she turns her mother’s shoulders are pointed away from her, her gaze forward or down. There is the occasional sad “Hi, kiddo” or kiss planted on forehead, but even these are mechanical, without their usual affection. Sofia’s solitude balloons.
With the cessation of the winds, the storms worldwide – hurricanes, cyclones, even tender, drenching rains – have stopped; the fires tearing through the West, no longer accelerated by frothing oxygen and spreading embers, burn themselves out. The temperatures drop in certain regions and skyrocket in others. Evaporation ceases, the wetlands ooze, and drier lands swiftly become deserts. Farmers panic. The children dying of famine and war worldwide suffer greater pain, the tyrants growing greedier or more merciless about potential scant resources. Turbines and hydroelectric power malfunction and whole cities begin to keep strict curfews on electricity usage. In Sofia’s home, the television flickers and goes out; her mother releases a deep groan.
Another day passes. Tom is stranded in a different town, all flights canceled, and Sofia delights in this, hopes he will be stuck there forever, but then feels guilty for feeling this way, knowing how much it might distress her mother.
When she goes out to the garden, she feels the deadness of the air on her bare forearms and a deadness in herself. To live in a world without movement, without momentum, is to live in a nightmare. The cessation of the wind is nowhere and everywhere all at once. Again, Sofia lifts her palm to her mouth and expels the air from her lungs as hard as she can, but there is not even the faintest impact of her breath against her flesh.
No wonder she couldn’t hear me, Sofia thinks.
Even when she’s talking, even when she can hear the words she’s forming and issuing, even when she knows in her bones that it’s all the truth, Sofia fears that if she isn’t believed, then she doesn’t exist. The nothingness again. She begins to wonder if she is affected by the world’s sudden missing winds or if she, herself, caused them, maybe by trying too hard to be heard. But she is not the center of the world. She hates herself for considering it. It’s better to stay small and inconsequential. How dare she assume she matters.
That Sunday, after five days of no winds and a hapless global response, Sofia drags her sleeping bag outside and lies down between the garden’s raised beds, her chin titled to the stars. Her home, without air conditioning, has become sweltering. Sofia kicks her legs out of the hot sleeping bag, turns over onto her stomach, finally sleeps.
In the morning, she wakes to see her mother has pulled a plastic red Adirondack chair near the foot of the sleeping bag. She sits there smoking a cigarette, something Sofia has never seen her do, although she’s smelled it on her mother now and again, a secret weakly kept from both husband and daughter. Now Sofia is let in on the secret. When her mother exhales, no smoke emerges. It, like Sofia’s voice, is swallowed up by the silent and omnipresent vacuum.
“I’m sorry,” her mother says, seeing Sofia is stirring, awake and watchful. “I didn’t want to believe he could do it. I’ve been at war with myself.”
Sofia sits up in her sleeping bag, laced now with glimmering slug trails.
“I think we should go stay with your Aunt Grace. We’ll contact the police. And we should leave today, before he returns. I failed you, Sofia, but I’m here now. He never should have done this to you.”
Her mother looks at her – really looks at her – and Sofia takes in a sharp, painful breath. When she lets go, she is sobbing into her knees, all of her terror and sorrow and pain lifting at once, and her mother is beside her, stinking wonderfully of cigarettes, a smell that is potent and everywhere, and her mother’s coffee breath is against her and she can feel her own breath hum against her skin, and near them, around them, the leaves of the lettuces begin to stir and the branches of the pine trees stretch and bend and her mother is telling her how sorry she is and how she loves her and will help protect her and the wind is back, all at once, not to destroy them but to urge them forward, to strengthen their resolve, and whether it’s a coincidence or a metaphor or a phenomenon doesn’t matter to Sofia. She cries and heaves in her relief and exhaustion and in her mother’s arms. She’s no longer so alone, and it’s this promise of change that courses around and through them, the truth of it, the constancy of it, the scattered wondrous fullness of it, always in motion even when you don’t see it.