Before the Rain

/ Liz H-H
Sailboat anchored under a thunderstorm night sky
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He’d woken up to thick haze, followed by blinding white lightning that would have lit him up like a cartoon skeleton, and thunder, mere seconds later, that rocked his small sailboat; he was glad he’d traveled farther up the coast to this tiny and deep protected harbor.

The rain hadn’t dropped yet but he felt the pressure of its immediacy; his traveling companion, Mags, shivered against his side, ears flattened and tail wrapped tightly against her side. His sister had smiled gently from her home hospice bed as she’d gifted the dog to him, murmuring she likes you better, anyway.

He figured he better go out and check the anchor line, drop a second one off the stern in case the storm was accompanied by rolling wave action; it wouldn’t do to wind up wrecked on this rocky northern shore that was also isolated.

Pinching the bridge of his nose in exhaustion, he rose from his berth; it was going to be a long night keeping watch, but hadn’t that been what the last six months of his sister’s life had been like?

He was glad for the active distraction of ropes and lines, the small anchor buried beneath cushions and bumpers stored in the aft compartment as these were things he could control.

© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2026)

20 thoughts on “Before the Rain”

  5. I like the way you set the scene in the opening sentence, Liz, immediate and tense, and introduce the back story of the dog and sister in the second, the canine-human element, and empathy with both man and dog. The final lines are a clever reveal of the character’s feelings and the way he’s coping with his sister’s death.

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