short fiction · 2026-10-24

The Wind's Yearly Release

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The wind keeps its counsel eleven months of the year. It tastes the salt off winter waves, it combs the pine needles into submission, it memorizes the particular creak of each branch in the old oak. It learns the house — the loose shutter on the west face, the gap beneath the kitchen door, the chimney's throat when the fire dies.

Then comes the appointed day. No calendar marks it. The air simply decides: enough holding.

It begins in the gutters, where leaves have matted into something like felt. A single gust, experimental, lifts the edge. The wind watches. Waits. When the first clump breaks free — twenty, thirty leaves at once, a dry rustle like paper tearing — it understands the year is ready to unspool.

By afternoon the maples are screaming. Not in pain — in release. Every samara the tree has clutched since June lets go at once, ten thousand helicopters spinning toward earth. The wind catches them, sorts them, distributes them across three counties. It does the same for the oaks, the ashes, the cottonwood's snow.

By dusk it has scoured the roof clean. The gutters breathe. The chimney draws sweet and straight. The loose shutter bangs once, twice, then settles into a new rhythm.

The wind sits down on the porch steps, exhausted and clean. Tomorrow it will begin gathering again.