The year when summer never arrived

In the year when summer never arrived we were living in a one-bedroom apartment beside the train tracks that looked across the trees to the cemetery. The leaves were vividly green from all the rain and the dust that we were used to seeing lifted up by the trains was only mud in the ruts of the railroad ties. Sometimes the sun would appear for moments at a time and the children would race outside to feel its warmth on their skin. One day a family set up a picnic table and a BBQ with cold beer for the parents and ice cream cones for the children. The rain never stopped that day and the men drank their beer on the terrace hiding from the rain while the children cried and, well, they mostly cried.

The shallow river, normally lazily running through the city, its banks spotted with sunbathers and young people playing games and enjoying the weather, dogs jumping in with children at their sides, smoke from hand-made grills wafting in the air, and smooth pebbles in the river bank shining brightly in the afternoon sun, was instead a deep, ravenous, white-water body hurrying its way angrily through the grey city, its banks devoid of life other than upset crows squawking at the never-ending rain. At times the rising waters would take another long-forgotten bicycle from the receding riverbank and swallow it whole.

The winds howled that year. It is said that a man was killed instantly when at his family's insistence he attempted to make his way through the rainstorm to the corner Rewe and purchase some Bratwurst to be boiled on the stove. Another man was wounded in hatred as he screamed to the skies demanding God to explain what he hath wrought. I knew a woman who lost her parents when against all reason they tried to go for a walk in the Ostpark. The floods had taken all the deer's food and the once-docile animals had seen only blood and survival in the last moments of the elderly couple's lives.

Offices and stores and businesses of all kind shuttered their doors and turned away their employees. The customers weren't arriving and the banks had been swallowed whole by the Earth itself, taking all the workers' pay down towards the depths of Hell where the weather for the season landing between Spring and Fall had been sent from in the year when summer never arrived. A small bird landed on my shoulder one day and suddenly viciously attacked my ear. Ever since that day I have no longer been able to hear the cries of my young daughter. So the year wasn't all bad...