The wind chime lashed and clattered against the house’s brick siding and the blue sky. Too violent for melody, spinning the metal bird that embellished it like a sparrow in a gale.
The potted marigolds on the table beside it stood perfectly still. The trees casting placid pools of shadow across the yard, the same. Every blade of rich summer grass at straight attention, while the flag beside the driveway drooped in negligence.
He tilted his head at the sight, from where it had nagged him across the street and onto the sidewalk. Leaning against the white picket fence like the neighbour he wasn’t, he watched the bird or the broken melody struggle against nothing, hollow metal tubes intent on beating themselves to dents.
The windows of the little brick house were all curtained. And anyways, it struck his intuition as nothing important. Practically a neat diorama to back the spectacle on its porch. A bit of context for the…
The bait? The warning? The back of his neck was prickling like one or the other. Not a single cloud sailed across that perfect July sky, the grasshoppers lazed and children laughed somewhere behind a higher fence, but his tongue and breath both tasted, at once, of trouble. His eyes had widened to peripheral details, while his fingers had tightened to the untamed splinters pushing up through the fence’s paint.
He’d never been a superstitious man. But this felt like the furthest thing from that – superstition and sense, the points most separate on a long road. His senses, all of them, all at once, were telling him trouble was on the way.
From what direction, the chime couldn’t say. Too overpowered by the force of its own warning. He swallowed, and tasted metal.
The chime bounced once more, emphatically, against the brickwork, and the pretty little chain that held it up must have snapped. It clattered from the edge of the table to the porch, out of his sight.
If he’d come by a minute later, he wouldn’t have known it was there at all. He forced himself to let go of the fence, but he couldn’t make the rest of his senses loosen their grip on the world. Or his memory, its grip on that metal bird, fluttering and faltering like something dying of panic in a fine net.
He couldn’t make himself let go of run. Trouble coming. He turned away, and might not have meant his first step to lurch him to a jog, or his third to a sprint, but soon he was at the end of the block, and beyond, and the sound of his steps echoed in the lazy silence of no warnings left.
