The Wind is Waiting

by Stefan Slater

The wind will break your heart, just as it broke all our hearts. But that’s why you’re here.

Right?

This is a city overwhelmed by gusts—benevolent, noxious, pleasant, and torturous. We are blessed. We are haunted. We are a people unable to suppress ourselves. Frigid north winds turn us somber, direct, and efficient with our work. Warm southern winds kissed by salt fill our dance halls with sweat and push us to tumble into backseats so fingers can trace hip bones until hangovers murder us all. But you’re here for the easterlies, which bring the heartbreak from the lonely peaks, that unpredictable pain we crave but honestly fear, like hearing that wild hello for the first and last time.

This time of year, hearths become infernos, turning childhood homes to ash. Little arguments tear apart decades-long friendships. This is a season for gambling and losing everything and having no choice but to start again. A time to share what you’ve always carried in your heart, and to have the door slammed in your face in response.

Most keep their windows shut, this time of year, because the heart can only take so much. But others, like you tourists, come here because they need change like the scratch of a match. Because they are the ones with a wedding band that doesn’t fit right. The ones who had voices, but now they’re nothing but walking whispers. The ones whose bones carried the truth of who they needed to be in life, a little waiting spark, but when they grew into adulthood, they saw in their reflections only the smothered stranger—a face belonging to the exhausted someone they swore they would never become.

The city will stagger tonight, powerlines whipping and pissing sparks in the wind, hotel windows rattling with promises of midnight visits. When the wind howls with heat, it will take shape for you, for him or her or all of them, any who ache for their life to be demolished. Look once: it’s only swirling leaves, flyers for cabarets, receipts that should’ve been kept hidden, stray dollars reeking of cheap perfume. But look again and you will see the shape coming together, becoming that handsome face that causes you to never call home again, and you will hear the rolling cobblestone voice that lets slip about a friendly card game, and you will feel the stabbing touch, a blade sinking in, that will cause you to strike the first policeman you see.

The shape was him, for me.

Because I came here without telling my family. I went out at night to the shore to have my skin scoured by windblown sand. The night boiled, as if the world ached to steal the breath from my lungs. I saw him, sliding down a sand dune, barefoot but wearing a beautiful three-piece suit and carrying a bottle of champagne, and he stumbled. I caught him. He looked up at me with those eyes (one green, one blue, verdant hills crashing into the sea), him with that playfully shy smile, him with confident hands and a keen awareness of every decent dark booth so we wouldn’t get caught, every perfect vista for watching planes takeoff and escape, every clever toast needed to coax my fragile hopes, and he said, as if it meant nothing to me, “Oh, there you are.”

He stunk of engine exhaust, spontaneous arson and smoldering creosote. I never said I had secrets, but he said he did, so I trusted him. He laughed when he swiped hats from people’s heads. He pretended that every window was a private door. I knew him, and he knew me, because while sitting in a stuffy movie theater together, while the men around us moaned and offered panting promises, he looked at me in the flickering light of the projector and I saw in his eyes the life I had fled: the woman I had loved in a way, the son I had held and whispered sweetly to so he would finally sleep. The life I had built well, but wanted to burn down with guilty kindling, because it was good, but it never did fit me fine.

I ignored the letters that tried to find me, the phone calls to the husband I wasn’t, because there was only him, only the way he bit down so hard but so softly, and even as the wind that he was, and is, roared so hard down my throat, even as the crowds protested justly in the streets for better pay (which they never received), as the towers the architects said were the better tomorrows we deserved tumbled anyway and cleared the way for the sun to finally kiss our foreheads, as the wind-mad waves rose up and drowned that pier with its gleaming carousel and innocent Sunday families, as the night erupted, I didn’t care. I stripped my life apart for him in a cheap motel. I fed him each piece of me like he was my sweet fire. I was happy, for once.

I fell in love stupidly. Everyone knows wind never settles down.

So just know, after it’s done, like me, you’ll wake up in a lumpy bed alone, bloated with guilt, clinging to the wreckage that is your life now, fully aware like a snapped bone that the taste of ash will always haunt your tongue, maybe a little, maybe too much, depending on the day and how much you’ve had to drink.

But here is what those politicians back East have to say: this city, this immoral place, will break your heart and then claim your life. It’s why they condemn our city.

Yes, our city.

Because here is something that only a local—because, in this place, even tourists can become locals overnight—can tell you: if the wind breaks your heart, you might survive, and if you do, this city is a wonderful place to start over, among us, where you will never be alone again, because this is a place to rebuild your life as it should be, not as it was.

We survivors understand the truth—of what it is like to let a fire burn down your heart willingly. Even if it ruins you. Because at least the lies can finally stop now.

So the wind is waiting.

But we’ll be here too.

Waiting. For you.

Stefan Alcalá Slater is a speculative fiction writer from Los Angeles. His work has appeared in F&SF, Flash Fiction Online, and Tales & Feathers Magazine. He can be found online at stefanaslater.com.