Before the Rain

Minutes before the rain begins I always waken, listening to the world hold its breath, as if a phone had rung once in a far room or a door had creaked in the darkness. Perhaps the genes of some forebear startle in me, some tribal warrior keeping watch on a crag beside a loch, miserable in the cold, though I think it is a woman's waiting I have come to know, a Loyalist hiding in the woods, muffling the coughing of her child against her linen skirts, her dark head bent over his, her fear spent somewhere else in time, leaving only this waiting, and I hope she escaped with her child, and I suppose she did. If not, I wouldn't be lying here awake, alive, listening for the rain to begin so that she can run, the sound of her footsteps lost, the sight of them blotted away on the path.