Backstroking across a green screen, the weatherman warns of falling skies and downed power lines. Spleen-shaped hailstones shatter windshields and aviaries. Neighbors find miracles in the wrecking ice: the Virgin Mary knocking a side mirror, Antony of Padua flipping the mailbox flag to empty. It is the first we’ve heard of the once-in-a-lifetime storm, so we fill our cellars with root vegetables and the dank smell of animal fear. The sharp stink of excitement too, catastrophe fermented. When it is done, we emerge blinking into the bloodless sunlight and embrace.

Later he says it again: here comes the once-in-a-lifetime storm. This time we have already lost homes to a kindling summer, dry lightning that set the golden hills ablaze and choked centenarian sycamores from root to bud. Our children cough en-route to school, round faces sectioned by shiny respirators, smoke-haloed heads bobbing. This time we are ready. Yes, we have held hands with this grief, mourned gentle seasons mutated into ravenous beasts. Beloved toys turned monstrous in the land of nightmares. We turn on the generator’s choke and listen to radio static Christmas carols. Stir chocolate powder into warm water and imagine frothing milk.

The weatherman makes his prediction season upon season, conviction a fraying thread. Our children outgrow their coats and leave us behind for the pulsing heartbeat of a faraway city. We listen to a broadcast that never changes, to the same warning in duplicate. We close our blinds to the desiccated landscape and place basins underneath the holes in the roof. The blue-eyed sky winks down. On TV, the camera zooms and focuses on the weatherman’s face, a plaster cast of false hope. The storm gathers and keens as we demand of his flickering image: whose lifetime?

Is it my lifetime, or yours, or that of the child freewheeling down the street on her yellow bike? Is it the white-crowned sparrow’s lifetime, a bird half-sleeping, half-waking in flight? Or is the lifetime suspended between this day and the next, a full mortal cycle unfurled in dream, in the space between breaths, in this abbreviated thought—