The Fog
It came as the people were still sleeping. It had been promised by the forecasters late in the evening prior, and that promise had come good. It moved slowly, unseen by the town’s people, in the early hours of the new day; wandering off of the sea and onto the land, curious and untrammelled. For those few who lived their lives in the night-time gloom, its arrival was heralded by the distant and muffled sound of far off ships blowing their deep bass foghorn. The fog had fallen, and so the captains had called for the horns to be blown, and so the foghorns had been blasted, and the dull bleat was carried across the sea, and like the last foamy remnants of a washed up tide, it bubbled quieter and quieter as it ambled further inland like a long and drawn out yawn.
While the people slept, the low sound drifted slowly through the streets, its lament growing feebler as it tried in vain to reach its hands further and further into the dimly lit corners and crevices of the town. The open windows it came across by chance were seized as opportunities to spread its low-pitched moan into the open ears of sleeping folk and worm their way into far-flung dreams of distant places and mysterious lands.
It was spring time and the mornings had been becoming brighter and brighter, but the morning to come would be shrouded in a dense and thick milky fog.
Like the blowing foghorns – still blowing at regularly timed intervals through the course of the early dawn – so too did the fog continue its creeping descent around the town: softening the amber glow of streetlights, pawing mutely at window panes, shrouding the town in a cold and damp funereal cover. Beads of water began to form on the tips of blades of grass, and as the dawn sun began to gradually rise – its weakened glow pushing and shoving its golden joy through the thickened and unyielding fog – it caused these beads of water to sparkle and glitter across the verdant green gardens of the town, creating a world of shimmering stars, pinpricks on a dark green canvas.
As the sun rose higher and higher, doing its best to penetrate the fog and bring about the start of the new day, its presence and power in the sky grew and grew, like a flower’s bulb awakening in the spring: its roots which had grown stronger and wider unseen and undisturbed, now gave a stage for the flower to begin its performance, tentatively pushing itself upwards, pushing the soil and dirt aside as it grows higher, upwards, further and further, in search of sweetest life-giving light. So like the nascent flower, the sun’s even and measured rise through the sky beyond the fog, enabled its warming touch to grow stronger and stronger. And as the sun grew stronger, so it was able to begin to diminish the fog’s hold over the land.
The early morning risers would see the fog, note its spectral presence with curiosity and wonder, but soon enough, the fog lifted and was gone, faster than it had taken to envelope the land. The fog had gone.