Tomorrow, her phone’s weather app predicts a thirty percent chance of rain at 9 a.m., sixty percent by 10 a.m., and one hundred percent between the hours of eleven and two. She’s willing to accept the iffiness of the morning hours, placing her and her daughter’s galoshes side by side by the front door, ready to go beneath the dollar store Frozen II umbrella she’d hung from the handle so they won’t forget it again. But the cockiness of the one hundred percent prediction fills her body with rage so red she wants to throw her wineglass into the fireplace, tear at the skin on her arms. 

Who’s to say anything will happen with that level of certainty? Will the ache in her left knee continue to predict changes in barometric pressure? Will the sprig of her daughter’s dirty blond hair, held in a locket at her chest, finally bring the luck it so long ago promised? Will the rain come in sheets or waves of gray mist?

Tomorrow, it will likely rain. Tomorrow, they will very likely drive to her appointment where they will more than likely receive information that will rather certainly change their current course, one way or another. 

But tonight, the clocks spring forward. They’ll lose an entire hour, just like that. The blink of an eye. Less than. And if they can arbitrarily change time like that, how can anyone be one hundred percent sure of anything?

Kelle Schillaci Clarke is a Seattle-based writer with deep L.A. roots. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Superstition Review, Pidgeonholes, Barren Magazine, Lunate, Cotton Xenomorph and Bending Genres. She can be found on Twitter @kelle224.

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