Storms and Saviors

Storms and Saviors
No one is immune to life’s storms, as everyone with a raindrop of sense knows. The pirate smiled to himself at the thought as one of his “lil scallywaggers”, as he called the dogs he walked, trod ahead of him. Years of experience walking city dogs had given him the ability to instinctively be on the constant scan both of his surroundings and the pups in his care while his mind rambled around semi-independently on whatever idea currently captured his fancy.

He wasn’t a conventional pirate, mind you; when he did steal, it was the immaterial. In that fantasy land of his very active imagination that he split time in with the real world, he still figured the label fit, though. His calling was such that he often felt he was essentially stealing money from those whose participation in the rat race pulled them away from relief for their pets while at the same time staying outside of that same rat race himself. Occasionally, in the uphill battle he often found himself in in romance, he felt like he was trying to steal hearts and love. Then, there was his habitual theft of bits of light in a dark world, snatching of moments of joy from a world of sadness and color from a monochrome earth.

That wasn’t all. His choice of lifestyle added to the aptness of the label. Independent and a wanderer, the nature of his occupation–both the dogwalking, the petsitting in a different home every week and the freedom both provided—added to his piratical nature.

Ultimately, however, he viewed “pirate” as just a label, like “punk”, “rocker”, “artist”, “biker”, and “American” among others, that was as much about a way of life as it was about details. They all boiled down to “rebel”, in his mind. He certainly was that. Years of focusing on being a freethinker had made it a natural part of him and he had the pirate’s anarchic healthy disrespect for the law, especially when it found itself in opposition to common sense as it too often did.

He smiled again as the wind tickled his neck with the edge of the paws and crossbones Jolly Rover flag he had sticking out of the top of the snow leopard print backpack of professional tools as if to illustrate the point: so he didn’t have a ship or a crew but he was Captain Cur, Pirate of the Tarred Seas nonetheless.

He paused at a corner when light struck his eye and glanced down at the shining pebbles of glass from a broken car window glittering up at him from the sidewalk in bittersweet beauty, both viscerally and for what they represented. Following the reflected sunray up to the steel-wool gray clouds it had momentarily broken through, he sighed. Rain coming. He was glad he had thought ahead and was clad head to toe in black leather, with his scarred biker jacket, hoodie and leather pants to at least stay somewhat dry during the days duties.

There was one thing missing. Pulling out his phone, his fingers danced across the screen in motions that happened so often they had became just as ingrained as his dog walking situational awareness. The strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”–the Dropkick Murphys version; he loved Elvis but not his croony stuff–started flowing from his phone. Tucking his phone back in his pocket, speaker pointed up so he could hear it without sacrificing surrounding sounds, he continued striding on.

Now, he was ready for the rain. Well, at least until the thunder started, then it was time to play his people’s shamanic song of storms, ACDC’s Thunderstruck. Speaking of thunder, he glanced up at the helicopter sound of rolling thunder above him, then did a doubletake, stunned at what the glance had shown him.

Expecting to see nothing but the usual chopper overhead, perhaps on it’s hero’s mission way to save another life, he was startled to witness something quite different. At first, that was exactly what he saw, just the flying whale shape of the flier, silhouetted black against the dark clouds. However, as he watched, an aurora borealis shimmer rippled over the hovering darkness, transforming it for an instant into a woman with the same whirling metal rotors on her back.

There and gone again, but in that split-second, two things traveled down his buzzing neural pathways, from eye to brain to memory. One was that she was stunning, with a beautiful face framed by wavy blonde hair the color of sunlight. The other was that she saw him see her, and was stunned herself that he could.