Prepare for Hail

What is this one doing? I peek over the mountain peaks to see a balding man bowing. I like the bald ones. They stand out to me, looking down on them and all. After each of his prostrations he looks up at me in terror. Then whyever are you here on a mountainside? Shouldn’t you be home and hunkered down?

He sets a huge basket of produce in front of a boulder craved into the shape of an oversize man. Then he begins his decent down the zigzag trail. Surely, he knows that my winds will shred that basket. Surely, he remembers how these snowy peaks tend to turn my water stores to ice. Surely, that’s why he’s scared. The hail I’m forming could destroy his garden and field.

“Come back!” I shout in thunder. “Don’t leave your food behind. You’ll need it.” He only descends faster. I don’t normally watch one human in particular, but the bald spot makes it it easy to track him, and his attics continue to baffle me. Instead of going straight home, he stops at the counter of a woman dealing out cards. He never touches the cards, but he pays her money and looks up at me a little less worried. Did she promise him food when he finds his plants torn and smashed?

He doesn’t go home after that either; he goes to the tavern. “Stop!” I thunder and accidentally spit out a lightning bolt. It strikes the big stone guy. He explodes. My apologies to whoever caved him.

Back to baldy. “Another!” he shouts. Why is he blowing his money drinking when he’ll have to rebuild his farm in the morning?

“Stop,” I whistle through the tavern’s windows. “Your family needs you sober. Your wife needs you safe.”