SCALE (2)

As long as it raged, there was little one could do but sit inside and feel its power. Like every storm she could remember, there was a roaring crash of glass utensils within the first couple of minutes. Over time, the little girl had concluded that a mysterious, perverse family arranged their glassware on the windowsill at the mere whiff of a storm, just so they could hear them break.

Soon, the closed window shutters rattled, followed by a menacing whoosh, the sound of an angry wind dealing with whatever lay in its path.

With power disconnected, the room was pitch-dark. Now and then, ventilation shafts admitted the pink-white brilliance of a lightning crackling across the sky. It relieved the obscurity for an instant, then the room seemed darker than ever. To keep the roar of the thunder out, the girl kept her earlobes pressed with her fingers. She sat close to her mother, who looked more reliable during thunderstorms, and asked her when the wind would slow. "Once it starts raining," her mother replied. 

This turned out to be inaccurate. The wind's fury refused to abate, even after heavy sheets of rain had started lashing around. The wind blew as if it was looking for scores to settle, with a piercing whistle and cruel method. 

For the girl, it was an unfamiliar face of the storm. She turned to her parents. They were trying to grade the storm according to its severity, as if the storm was a creature of reason and understanding and it would somehow reduce the hazard it posed. 

"Listen to that sound, that is a tree being uprooted," her father told her. Her mother asked her to invoke the relevant deities. The girl realised her parents were omnipotent only till a bad storm struck. In a calamity, they were puny and useless.