Fake News

The toad said there would be an almighty storm.

The kind of storm that lays low the mountains of the Earth.

An End Of Days type storm.

Which is the only thing the toad ever says.

Day in, day out … week in, week out … month in, month out … a year at a time … the toad says nothing.

It might as well be dead.

And sometimes it’s so long between events that I think it must be.

But then, as if beamed down from a spacecraft, it reappears … sitting in some overlooked plant tray full of months-old rainwater … and signals the arrival of the mother of all storms … the Ursturm.

And indeed, out of nowhere, a sudden, almost menacing, uncommonly hot, wind got up, causing fences to creak, rooftiles to flap, windows and doors to slam shut and litter to skitter eerily along the road as if unsettled by the approach of some unseen terror.

The light was best described as stormlight — that preturnatural yellow that precedes the Götterdämmerung.

There was a rainbow against the rapidly darkening sky — which never bodes well.

A spit of rain.

A solitary rumble of thunder.

And nothing.

Absolutely nothing happened.

I’m not surprised the toad didn’t hang around.

Normally, it appears out of nowhere … there’s a God-almighty storm, the like of which makes you wonder if it mightn’t be prudent to believe in ghosts and vampires after all … and it sits in the overlooked plant tray whilst the rain hammers down.

But not this time.

In the blink of an eye¹ it was gone again — almost as if it knew it was going to be a washout and was off to find a better storm elsewhere.

I’m gonna have to have words with that toad the next time I see it — that’s false advertising, that is … fake news!

—
¹ Or at least the time it took me to slaughter hundreds of opponents with a sniper rifle and rocket launcher, only to get killed by a mechanised monster anyway ².

² Mere centimetres from the next checkpoint, naturally.