"The storm on the outside looks oddly calm..." she thought with half closed eyes. For a moment she stayed that way, slumped in the old chair by the window, listening for the low rumble she expected but didn’t hear. The sky was washed in a flat gray that reminded her of wet paper. No lightning. No wind pushing against the house. Just that heavy stillness that made her shoulders tense. She sat up a little. The dog wasn’t barking. The trees weren’t moving. Even the clock on the wall felt too loud.

Maybe it wasn’t a storm at all. Maybe it was the kind of quiet that comes right before something shifts. Not dramatic, just… different. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and watched the street. A plastic grocery bag lay in the gutter, untouched. She checked her phone for the weather alert again. Nothing had changed. Strong storm warning. High winds expected. Stay inside.

She frowned. “Then where is it?”

The first hint came a second later. A flicker at the edges of the houses across the street, like heat rising off asphalt, except it wasn’t hot. It moved too slowly, like a curtain being pulled back. She blinked. The houses didn’t glitch or dissolve; they simply… slid out of place, as if she were seeing them through water. Her chest tightened. “Okay. That’s not wind.”

She grabbed her coat without looking away from the window. The quiet deepened, as if the world were waiting for her to notice something important. And she realized she’d been wrong: the storm wasn’t outside. Not really.

It was coming from the space between things, creeping into view, patient and unhurried. And it wasn’t done yet.