The Rising

The sky hung low with bruised clouds, swollen with the weight of what was coming. The sea had grown strange — no longer the soft-spoken friend of morning fishers and laughing children, but a stranger with eyes that rolled and roared in unknowable fury.

The wind spoke first. Whispers at dawn, a warning in the gulls’ uneasy cries. It grew louder by noon, tearing through shutters, howling down chimneys, rattling the bones of the very earth beneath our feet. And then came the silence. The awful, bracing silence — the kind that grips your lungs and makes you feel as if the world itself is holding its breath.

We knew what it meant.

There’d been word, of course. News from beyond, warnings on the wireless, maps coloured red and the word evacuate etched into every corner of our lives. But this town — our town — was not just a place. It was memory and blood, song and story. These streets were stitched into our souls. And so, we stayed.

I remember the way we gathered, as if drawn by some deep ancestral tether. On the cliffs, in the churchyard, along the broken pier where lovers once kissed and old men told tales. We stood — mothers with babes wrapped tight, old fishermen with eyes saltier than the sea, shopkeepers, teachers, the postman, the choirboys — and we waited.

And then we saw it.