"Predictions and Presentiments"

"I had been looking for something like a beginning. A strange thing, perhaps, to expect from time, or from life: the chance to begin, or to begin again. All I had to do, or so I thought, was answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives? It was going to be only her and me from now on."

"So many winds populate the skies here, with their furious blasts and roaring gales, that the Greeks thought it was in one of the caves off this coast that the god Aeolus housed all the winds. This soft, humming, damp Levante coming in will turn the sea a much deeper, darker blue and bring respite from the dry heat, maybe even some rain."

A mother and her daughter arrive on an island seeking a fresh start. They step onto a star-filled tarmac as the moon rises behind a dark mountain, and the child notices a "sky-yawning." A taxi radio reports Etna's plume and an upcoming lunar eclipse while the driver describes the Levante, a damp, humming wind that deepens the sea and may bring rain. The Levante is framed as a sailor's favored wind, carrying boats with smooth gusts from the stern. The mother senses the wind's arrival as a promising omen for reinvention.

Read at The New Yorker