Hit and Miss
Six consecutive gusts. The last made the old leafless cottonwood’s upper bony branches creak in a voice clearly ready to conclude this round and enter the weightless freedom of browsing nature books (with or without pictures but pictures were always nice) and scouting for affordable vacancy closer to the river.
Of course the observer, in this case a local gentleman resident, coincidentally or not coincidentally bearing striking resemblance to the creator of this in-progress tale-in-miniature; anyway, said observer was clueless about the old leafless cottonwood’s internal monologue.
What the observer was not at all clueless about was the seventh gust which delivered grains of sand that stung his cheeks and attempted to add grit to his imminent lunchtime sandwich experience. The upper bony branches repeated the creak, but this time they added a vivid crack.
“Dumbass me. Should’ve taken up the offer from those tree-trimmer guys. Thought it would be nice to leave it for the birds’ perching, and maybe my photography passion, maybe get a close hawk shot.”
As though the air current possessed levels of consciousness fit to interpret local human language; then again the observer knew it wasn’t true, but he still performed the hand motion requesting compassion. But gust's response was as good as a guffaw. This time it succeeded in getting grit between the human’s lip; made him spit like fighting off the little hairs of a bramble berry.
“Might be a good time to fix that ham, tomato, and mayo sandwich; else I shortly may have no kitchen. Guess I should’ve listened to those survivalists. But their demeanor; their postures; their cinematography style. Not quite as bad in the skin-crawling sense as women’s magazines, movies, television, and… well that covers enough. Lecturers. Gosh but I wonder if lecturers do not amount to the majority of pursuits, or it is a genetic thing. Humans born to find something to lecture others about.”
Another gust; records forever lost while the observer babbled. Gust number eleven. Twelve competes. Whichever gust gusted this time, blew in perfect cadence to satisfy the randomly chosen word count number. For this was the gust that created the loudest definitive crack of wood that stood. Top of the tree tottered to and fro. Observer held his breath. Stepped back. The cottonwood finally gave up. Harsh creaking crack. Didn’t hit the house.
“Looks like I have firewood. Sweet.”