The Bruise of the Sky

The air before a storm tastes like wet copper and ozone, a metallic tang that settles at the back of the throat. It is a heavy, static-charged pressure that makes the fine hairs on my arms stand up, as if the atmosphere itself is reaching out to touch me. I remember the feeling of standing in a field, the grass damp and cool against my ankles, waiting for the sky to break open. There is a specific kind of silence that precedes the thunder—a held breath, a tightening in the chest that mirrors the dark, swollen clouds above. We are small, fragile things beneath that vast, churning weight, yet we are drawn to the violence of it, the way the light suddenly tears through the gloom like a hot needle through velvet. Does the earth feel this same shiver, this sudden, electric anticipation of being undone by the rain? Where do we go when the world decides to change its shape so completely?

Chris Horner has captured this exact tension in his work titled Weird Sky. The way the light fights the darkness feels like a physical ache in the chest. Can you feel the air cooling as you look at it?