Storms in India are silently deafening. They come with dark cloudless skies. Winds blowing at the speed of over 70 kmph. They seem as if the Deities are throwing electric swords from the heaven. Even alerts given by the geographical department fails to save lives when they come hours after the alerts are declared, or even hours before. The mighty nature seems to take revenge on the people who are destroying it.

It’s not that the nature is angry, it seems to lose its patience on us.

And why shouldn’t it.

STORMS OF INDIA was originally published in Eddie’s Story Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unfortunately (an fortunately) my wife and I have rushed off to the Jersey Shore to await the arrival of twin nephews coming any day now. So I have little time to prepare a proper descriptables post.

This is where you come in. Submit your most vivid and powerful description of youth, a newborn child, or the experience of infancy itself, seeing the world for the first time. If your new here, I’d love to add you as a writer if you comment with your Medium handle.

Although I’m not writing my own Descriptable here, there is an Emily Dickinson poem about childhood sorrows I think about a lot, whenever I see a baby crying or a child in the grips of a tragedy over what seems small to us. Their sorrows put our own in perspective. You can read it here.

Descriptables #13: Baby Blues was originally published in Eddie’s Story Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This past week has been stormy.

As I watched from my in-laws New Jersey porch by the sea, the sky unleashed fury one day after the next, calm days surrendering to electric summer nights filled with rain and lightning.

It is quite possible that Shakespeare has written the best descriptable about storms in King Lear (Act III, Scene II), and likely that nobody will ever write another:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

That being said, if we avoided writing on all topics that Shakespeare did better, we would have thrown away our quills and word processors long ago.

If you are new here (would love to see new writers), the challenge of a descriptable is simple: describe something as vividly as you can. This week’s challenge is a storm. It could be the storm in the picture above, or any storm you like. Make it come to life. Follow the publication and editor, comment below with your Medium handle, and I will add you as a writer. Please include the usual (reference which descriptable number you’re responding to, include alt text with an image, check your spelling, and so on). I promote all published descriptables on my BlueSky account as well.

Here is my descriptable for context:

It is incorrect to say that nature is angry withus. The truth is more sinister. It is indifferent. Death comes in dark clouds from the west that overflow waterways, flood villages, uproot trees, upend lives. Lightning tossed by some blind deity strikes a hole in the sky, shakes our bones with its rumbling. Wind tears with cold claws. We watch from behind a thin pain or two of glass, in the warmth of an old house that has stood through a century of storms, watching in awe, holding each other, trusting in where we have set our lives, believing that we will see clear skies again one day, but knowing that any moment a new storm can roll on in.

Descriptables #12: The Tempest was originally published in Eddie’s Story Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dusk surrenders to night as the last of the peach hue fades at the horizon.

Up the beach a lone rocket launches over the slate water, a gull cries in protest. Somewhere in a neighborhood behind the condos a bang issues a shower of green flares.
On the barge off shore, now a black rectangle gently rolling, a white glow is seen moving about. The light goes out. A hush falls on the onlookers along the shore, broken only by the gentle surf.

A pause then a stream of golden sparks streaks to the sky followed by three more.
The crowd breathes. A quick succession of four, five, six dazzling streams leap skyward, exploding in purple and green and red. The brilliant light reaches the eyes a moment before the sound which thumps the chest and quickens the heart. Still even higher, more sparkling stalks reach, bursting into gilded flowers against the dark sky, crackling as their petals blume.

On and on the barrage increases until the crescendo of dozens of rockets and mortars expended at once, leave a haze of smoke and sulfur drifting on the salty air.

Descriptables #11: Explosive Freedom

Fireworks over the Beach was originally published in Eddie’s Story Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As America gets dressed up for her 250th birthday, there is more than the smell of barbecued hot dogs in the air. There is a great divide in politics, ideals, and visions of the future. But even though families fight, nobody wants drama on their birthday, so I’m hoping that this weekend we can take a break from it all, drink something cold, sweat away the stress in this unholy, chthonic heat, and watch the loud, pretty explosions that fill up the sky.

In recent years, I have heard several people express distaste towards fireworks. They frighten dogs, trigger PTSD, rattle eardrums, fill the air with smoke, and blow off the occasional finger. Although these are valid concerns, I know of few experiences that unleash such explosive nostalgia, such childhood magic and wonder, such captivating energy as a fireworks show. I often struggle to remember details about my youth through the haze of the years, but the colorful burst of fire and smoke sends me quickly back to the display at Jones Beach — to Depeche Mode summers and Billy Joel nights — when I was too young to have an opinion about Reagan, when the walls around childhood innocence were as sturdy as the wall between East and West Berlin, when freedom was a flag and a burger and a burst of light in the sky.

We have been looking more critically at the past, and this is long overdue. Long promised freedoms need to given, and long silenced questions need to be answered. But for today, let’s take a moment to look at the sky and be a little bit dazzled.

The challenge is simple: describe fireworks as vividly as you can. To be added as a writer, comment below with your Medium handle and follow both the publication and the editor. Your submission should hopefully have a heading and subheading, a picture with alt text, a few tags, and a hundred words or so bringing the experience to life.

Here is my descriptable:

The chairs are set, the beers are cold, the sun is setting, and the eyes are fixed in the sky. The first burst comes, sending a gasp through the crowd. Mouths open in wonder as red and green and gold umbrellas of light and smoke tear at the clouds, filling the air with smoke and rhythm. It is the beating of an ancient drum, which played in our hearts long before these rockets played it for the heavens, reminding us that freedom and hope and danger and power and awe keep company together, and sometimes, on a hot summer night, all we can do is sit on a beach chair and watch it play out before us.

Descriptables #11: Explosive Freedom was originally published in Eddie’s Story Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The wind whipped across the lake, stiff but cool, refreshing the steamy late afternoon. The bright sun, still high enough above the horizon, illuminated the trees across the lake, creating a brilliant kaleidoscope of greens that divided the purple-grey of the coming thunderhead from the choppy steel-grey of the lake. Suddenly, as the leading curtain of rain reached the shore, a double rainbow arched, its zenith reaching the tops of the clouds and stretching from end to end the breadth of the lake. Advancing as a herald, its array of colors stark before the raw majesty of the torrents to come.

Descriptables #10: All the Pretty Colors

The Rainbow was originally published in Eddie’s Story Challenges on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.