Intense

A deep, dark, navy blue sky to the west punctuates the few people outdoors hurrying about their business before the storm strikes.

Streelights click on.

Lightning, still in the distance, flashes ominously behind the clusters of houses and buildings that reduce it to simply lighting up the sky, providing an aura around the concrete world. The wind picks up, rolling dead leaves across the quickly emptying streets and flopping Beagle ears.

Then the first few rain drops: drip, drip, drip, drop. Drip again. And real lightning, true lightning, closer and closer and defined in all its glory.

Now real raindrops, hammering roofs and freeing the crackly red leaves not yet dead enough to depart their homes, their trees, on their own. Then silence. Ethereal, whole silence, of which there are nearly as many different kinds as of sound.

Like this silence, merely a break between storms. Like the one soon to come, bidding good-bye to the thunder. Until we meet again, it says. And the storm agrees heartily with one last lingering rumble of thunder. Silence need not reply.