single occurrences

An almanac is a record of what returns. The following entries were removed from the main almanac and kept here, because each was observed once and has not been observed again. They are filed in the order they came in. No interval is given, because there is no interval.

the warm rain at veil’s crossing

Rain that fell at the temperature of skin for eleven minutes. Those caught in it reported, independently, that it felt like being indoors and outdoors at the same time. The gauge that caught it has been kept since, dry, on the shelf above the others. It is the same model as the others.

glass frost

Frost that formed clear instead of white. The grass looked only wet until it was stepped on, and then it broke with a sound. The conditions were unremarkable and have been entered into the model many times. The model produces ordinary frost.

the inland tide

A fog that came in and went out, twice, on a regular interval, eighty miles from any sea. It was timed by a schoolteacher with the class’s clock. The interval she recorded matches no tide table for any coast, but it is, she noted in the margin, exactly the length of the lesson she had planned and did not teach.

the quiet

A calm so complete that its absence of sound was itself reported as weather. The birds did not stop. They could not be heard. It lasted, town-wide, the length of one held breath. It is the only entry in the almanac with no measurable quantity beside it. The column is left blank rather than zeroed, on the compiler’s instruction; zero, he wrote, is a measurement.

red evening, non-recurring

To be distinguished from the common red sky, which returns. In this one the light came from below the horizon and lit the undersides of things — chins, eaves, the bellies of leaves. It was photographed. The photographs show an ordinary dusk. The witnesses have seen the photographs and maintain that the photographs are wrong, and they say this calmly, the way one corrects a clock.

the standing wind

Wind that blew straight up, in a flat field, with no warmth beneath it to explain the lift. It raised the seed-heads to one height and held them there most of an afternoon, level, as though the field were under glass. Two farmers watched. The one camera fogged. Filed under anomalous lift, a category created for it and containing, to date, only it.

the seat

A single cubic meter of air, at shoulder height, in the market square, that stayed at the previous season’s temperature for one whole day — sharply bounded, so that a hand could be put into last summer and taken out again into now. It was roped off in the morning. It was gone by the next. The rope is still there. People walk through where it was without slowing, which is correct; there is nothing there. The rope is left up, the compiler wrote, not to mark the place but to mark that we did not catch it. We only stood around it while it lasted, and wrote down that it had a temperature, and a height, and four sides made of nothing, and no name we could give it that would bring it back.