Freezing Point | Edie Meade

I’m looking out the window at the black canvas awning rippling and dripping water from the same four places. Rain goes sluggish at thirty-four, thirty-three degrees. And I think about you in the other room with your head bowed over your phone, scrolling, scrolling like rain in its comfortable paths down an awning. The water rivulets toward four points of departure to pock the cement in the same four craters it has made. It excavates the pearls of river rock, which it also made, from the sidewalk somebody laid so long ago. Then the temperature drops to thirty-two and the awning stops rippling and the water stops dripping. A perfect temperature memorialized in teardrops, frozen rain, frustrated rain, and the world goes slow-motion quiet. If I told you I witnessed the freeze would you stop whatever you are doing and find me a physics of rain? Scroll, scroll to tell me how nature erodes everything solid in time, and yet no one can truly bear witness? Rivuleting through science to somehow prove your disbelief, go sluggish in the effort? Along the awning, raindrops shiver and cling.

Edie Meade is a writer, artist, and mother of four in Huntington, West Virginia. Recent work can be found in Atlas & Alice; The Normal School; Feral; Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. Say hi on Twitter @ediemeade or https://ediemeade.com/.