Bad Weather

Rain keeps the lawyer Kvashin in town; his wife and her mother play cards and worry. Chekhov’s Bad Weather looks like a family afternoon and turns on what the weather is covering — absence, a lie, the small theatre of concern. A short story of trust wearing thin, told at the temperature of a wet Russian summer. Nothing epic happens, which is the point. A closed town, a delayed husband, a visit planned in worry — then the story’s real weather arrives, and it is not rain.