It wasn’t a big crowd, but then it never had been. Three trucks were huddled along the side of the makeshift road. Several people milled about. Obviously this was not the most accessible place on earth, and carpooling just made good sense. Someone had thought to throw a cooler in the back of one of the pickups.
They’d gathered a few hours earlier, but it had taken years to assemble. Each had done research individually which had led, inevitably, to them meeting each other. Some had interviewed local folklorists. Some had braved the web of illogic that supports the internet’s conspiracy theory message boards. Others had followed notes in old books, whispers in old songs, memories they were certain did not belong to them.
A fourth truck, the last one expected, rounded the corner. It bounced off the rough road and skidded to a stop at the end of the line. The driver exited, alone.
“Not too late?” she asked. She was a young woman with ambitiously long hair dyed nearly white.
“Nope, still a few minutes off,” answered a man of about forty. He pointed at a far-off bolt of lightning that came and went. “Tanner didn’t come with you?”
The young woman shook her head.
“Any idea why?” asked a fit middle-aged man who had, for two weeks twenty years ago, lived out his dream as a professional athlete before a rare diagnosis ended his playing days. Medicine and the gym had kept him healthy, but not alive in the same way.
She shook her head in reply, but lifted an eyebrow as if to suggest she had ideas. But they were negative, and the group had made an early pact to avoid being negative with one another.
Something they hadn’t understood had called them. None had felt they were looking for it. Most led relatively fulfilling lives; they had day jobs, spouses, kids, friends, sports teams they rooted for and snarky neighbors they rooted against. But each had experienced something that was, in its time, unexplainable.
A flash of a face in a window in the brief flash of lightning.
Thunder that sounded like someone calling a name.
Wind whipped against tree branches, bending them into an unnatural arrow pointing west.
Rain that pelted against a screen door in a melody that was unfamiliar but, somehow, still known.
How they had come together was less remarkable. Any disparate group of people seeking the same thing will, in time, coagulate. It is the nature of a search, like how scientific discovery eludes all of humanity for eons, then two or three scientists all discover the same thing, or invent the same machine, or identify the same element, all at once.
Distant thunder rumbled in a soundtrack to anticipation. A few of the people tapped their toes into the dirt and sand. No one was entirely sure what awaited them, or if what they thought awaited them even existed. No one had been able to get confirmation firm enough to be considered staunch. They only knew what came cloaked in the arriving clouds and wind and thunder and lightning and rain.
The people of the storm.
As the minutes passed, the dark clouds roiled overheard, moving ever east. Lightning struck a few times near the monuments. They strikes increased with frequency as a premature twilight settled over the desert. Among the small crowd, anticipation swelled as the bursts of electricity neared the towers of stone.
In quick succession, lightning hit the top of each of the massive relics of a shallow sea long evaporated. The high, flat top of each butte flashed, one after the other.
Then a fourth bolt struck the middle of the road by the trucks. It was there and gone in a moment. But it left behind a man.
He was dressed in clothes made of dim light. His hair was the same white-and-grey swirl as the sky above. With quick, sharp movements of his head, he looked around at the gathered group of people.
“This it?” he asked.
The people looked around, unsure who was supposed to speak.
“Oh, come on,” the man said, rolling his eyes. “This is demoralizing. What’s the point of having worshippers?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say we’re worshippers,” said the married man.
“You wouldn’t?”
“More like… curious dabblers.”
The storm man rubbed his forehead and groaned. “Ok, let’s just… let’s just get to it.”
“Aren’t there more of you?” someone asked.
“Yes, there are more,” the man answered. “Lots.”
“But it’s just you now?”
The man looked around, hand over his eyebrows, as if pretending to search.
“Do you see anybody else standing around here in clothes made of light?”
The young woman leaned as if to look behind the man. Then shrugged. “Guess not.”
“Well then let’s assume I’m the only one here at this particular moment.”
For a long moment, everyone looked at each other in silence. The majesty of the man’s appearance had been muted by the singularity of him. This group had, on the whole, expected the people of the storm to involve people as opposed to person.
“What should we call you?” the white-haired young woman asked.
The storm man shrugged. “Names are a human thing. Doesn’t really matter to me, or any of us.”
“The thing is,” someone else said, “We were led to believe there would be a bunch of you and-”
“I’m a representative,” the storm man said testily. “We don’t just show up in numbers for any shambolic group of,” and then he shot the first speaker a dark look, “curious dabblers, do we?”
“Alright, let’s all take a moment,” the ex-athlete said. He put his hands up in the universal sign of someone who believes they have a handle on things if everyone would just, for a moment, calm the hell down. Luckily, everyone did precisely that.
“Thanks.” The storm man looked at him with a measure of appreciation “Seems like we got off to a rough start. Let’s try again. Why did you all come here? Why did you chase the storm?”
“The thing is…. I thought, and we all feel this way, that we were sort of… called,” the young woman spit out before awkwardly adding, “By you.”
Smiling, the storm man bobbed his head left and right. “Faces reflected by lightning? Wind making things bend in strange ways? Thunder words?” The group nodded. “These are reflections of what we are, they are not signals. Our purpose is not, barring extreme circumstance, to summon anyone.”
“That… answers some questions, certainly, but I’m not sure it ticks all the boxes,” the married man admitted, trying to show some tact. “And we really are interested in knowing more about who your people are and, ahh… well and all the rest.”
“You are a punishingly underinformed bunch,” the storm man said. Thunder boomed behind him, though there was no preceding lightning. “And I think this was more introductory than productive. You have more work to do, more concentration to hone, more faith to ascribe before any of us can begin to exchange our strengths to soften each other’s weaknesses.
“The storm is ephemeral. With it, we come and go. We dance on the tips of existence, and there are eras when whole nations revere us. Judging by the contemporary standards,” he said, taking a moment to lay a disapproving look at each person assembled. “It appears expecting a nation-level scale is probably a touch quixotic. Best to start with some building blocks. Can anyone tell me where we are?”
“Monument Valley,” the ex-athlete said.
“Right but what is here?”
“Buttes.”
“Formed how?”
“Water cut through, a shallow sea, maybe rivers later on.” The ex-athlete was a geology buff, and he’d led the group’s charge on the site research.
“Water. Fed, as all water must be at times, from storms. Lightning and thunder and wind… they will have their time in your studies. But you must start where all storms start. You must start with water.”
“I’m sorry, but start what? My work schedule is not entirely accommodating,” the young woman said, not complaining but also not willing to accept homework from a guy in strange, made-of-light clothes without some kind of assurances it would pay off in the end. “What kind of assurances can you give us that doing more will get us anything? We don’t even know why we did all the work to find each other and get here in the first place.”
The storm man snapped his fingers, which sounded like a very tiny crack of thunder. A little spark of lightning even shot up from his fingertips.
“No assurances,” he said, unrepentant. “But I think you do know why you’ve come to this place. You all said you felt called, and yet I assure you we did no such thing. You saw our reflections in the storms as what you wanted to see – a symbol, a sign, a reason to believe there was something more waiting out there between the raindrops.
“Perhaps there is. But I’ve spent enough time in this corporeal form without anyone doing so much as offering me a coffee, so I think-”
“Oh, sorry,” someone said, leaning into the back of the pickup. “I think we have some left.”
“I don’t want coffee,” the storm man barked.
“But you just said…”
“I was illustrating a point about manners which, shockingly, has been misin- you know what? Let’s just put a cap on this whole thing. There is more, and it may very well be the type of more each of you seeks. Study water, its movement and its history and, especially, its legends. The great flood legends are all paramount. Learn it all well, and we will meet again.”
Lightning snapped sharply, and the man vanished.
Everyone piled into the cars and began the long trek home. Some would give up after today because the only thing they sought was confirmation that something had, in fact, existed in those brief moments of in-between during a thunderstorm. Thus sated, they left the valley like a vacationer returning to his hometown airport after a wonderful, satisfying trip.
Others drove off with a different feeling. The young woman, the ex-athlete, the married man, and maybe one or two more. As the tires crunched over the road, they felt on their way out just as they felt when the storm rolled in only an hour earlier. They felt a burning anticipation, like the air was charged with electricity and possibility and something else.
Something more.
The Tall Tale Year 
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