It rained.
The intoxicating thing about rain is its smell. The rich must of earth. The articulation of it. Articulation. That’s a word I’ve learned to like. It means each is pronounced and a part. When it rains try prying open those nose flaps and sucking in Mama’s damp breath and wetness until you see stars blinking inside your eyelids watching over the jungle sprouting in your lungs from that dampness of the fresh rain in the darkness inside and you hear your heart beat wildly under the lush lush suffocating canopy those alien tribal drums.
Some people. Some prefer the smell before the pour of rain when clouds squeeze and hang in your face ripely plumply sorely pregnant but I get all but overwhelmed by the claustrophobia of that anticipation. Imagine being locked in a cage with a pair of eighty-pound hounds half predator without quit half nightmare without end and they drool and they are diseased a disease that runs on diesel and they pull the chains binding them so taut that the metal whimpers and they bark thunder. Yes, certainly smell is in the moment and present but it hardly takes any primacy at all.
I met her right here in this pool. It was also raining like it did just now. Another thing I like about rain is its convenience. No one goes in the pool when there’s rain and I get to enjoy it, all of it, by myself and I get to go to that place that not even nobody knows about. And when you hang at the bottom and look up, you see the rain drops and their ripples dance above and it’s beautiful. You don’t get rained on under water. Not for forever of course because then you drown and that’s not good for nobody by which I mean the fellowship of nobodies.
When I surfaced, the day I met her, I had been under for almost too long and my eyes didn’t work right straight away and my ears rang but I still caught a gasp, a small scream through the curtain of rain. I looked around but the eyeballs hurt like hardboiled eggs grinding in salt in those sockets and all I did see was a little ball of fire floating above the edge of the pool and I heard sobbing somewhere else. I turned to look everywhere else but no turns were right until it clicked in my head that it was the ball of fire that was weeping and it was my head that spun.
I called to the fire He-hello?
The fire just cried harder and more so I swam to it and I saw her for the first time and this is a question that I have asked myself many times before and the question is how many times have I seen her in count and I have tried counting from the first time forward and the last time back but I never did figure out the number because memories of such meetings always held out its hand and invited me in and I always took it in my palm. And I’ve been scared because bad as I am at mathematics I know that numbers make things finite. She was the ball of fire of course. Her long unruly hair orange and red. She had a blue jean-dress on that wasn’t right for any kind of pool occasion I could imagine. A child pariah accidentally intruded and lost who had freckles in her face.
I asked Wh-wh-why are y-you he-here?
She did not answer.
I said Ca-can you swi-sw-swim?
She nodded.
Co-come w-with mmm-me. Y-y-you www-won’t kn-know your cry-crying.
I drew in a huge breath. Extra big so she could see and I nodded at her so she did the same and I reached and grabbed her wrist and pulled the ball of fire under water into the deep. She weighed nothing. At the bottom in the deep, I spun her around and pointed up. Above us in the gray box of sky rain drops made colorless stars and blinked themselves into rings and larger and away. She looked intently and the tears on her face had drowned. The orange and red floated around and billowed in the motions of this private place. Whatever made her cry whatever makes us all cry for that matter lurched somewhere above but we were nowhere at all.
When the rain had stopped, we sat by the edge of the pool where she sat before. Her blue jean-dress soaked through into a darker shade and we talked. Slowly. She said she thought I was a pool monster. I told her she was a ghost fireball. She asked if I always had a stutter and I said only after I learned how to talk. It was a joke but she nodded gravely. I showed her my mouthful of all kinds of gold teeth and said that my stutter was once so strong it broke most of my real teeth which was a true story. She showed me her missing tooth. The one at the front next to her top left canine. She studied my tattoos and I told lies about them. She said she went to the fifth grade. Kids around that pool were straight shooters and they had pointed and laughed at the size of my bikini and a big splash I made once after I took an upper and made the mistake of being happy and cheerful and I cannonballed into the pool for the second last time. Even adults had been jarred by my dimensions and the way the tattoos covered every square inch of my skin. They just didn’t say nothing but they performed such small gestures that meant the things they didn’t say. That and my stutter had generally veered me away from sunny days at the pool but I told her I came to the pool in the rain because I liked the rain. She said she liked it too.
There was a bug I couldn’t name toppled over in a little puddle of rain water or pool water near us. It kicked its little legs fervently and anonymously at the rolling gray above. Many times it looked as if it was going to right itself but would finally tumble back belly up as if drunk or concussed or both. We looked at it a while.
I said It’s a sh-shame. It co-co-could just-just wait f-for the wat-wat-water to evapo-ev-eva-evaporat-rate.
And the little brows of the little fireball twisted in thought for a while and finally she said it probably didn’t know about evra-pro-ration. She said it probably doesn’t even know about the sun.
We picked it up and placed it under the shelter of a bush behind us and it scuttled away in a hurry to where we didn’t know.
That summer when it rained I found her by the pool. We went to the bottom together and held hands there. Hers will disappear in mine but that comforted the both of us. She got good at holding her breath and asked once that when she got really good whether she could stay under forever and I told her no but maybe long enough til the rain passed. I asked if she wanted a pair of goggles and she said I never used a pair either. She told me proudly she examined puddles even at school and looked for bugs trapped in them and if she found them she would liberate them but there always seemed to be more if she looked plenty and hard and she wondered if some of the bugs had been the same ones and if they came back themselves. She updated me on the number of bugs saved and reported to me she had studied the little strugglers and that the reason they couldn’t stop kicking and trying not even for a moment was they can’t hold their breath for long and they would die if they did stop. She observed the danger out there that any single drop of water could hug to their wings and it would not let go and thus flight was disallowed. She asked why it was that we could lift ourselves out of the pool with ease yet a bug could not escape a shallow puddle that would dry in an afternoon. I taught her about the surface tension of water, that there is this small force that binds water to itself, a covenant it keeps to its kind.
What’s a convenant?
A p-p-promise.
I said creatures like us are much too large for that covenant, our massive will and caprice.
What is caprice?
I-it mmmeans o-our p-p-prommmise is is no goo-ood.
But for smaller creatures water can lock its door and wall them in its corpus. Water lives in a different kind of world I said. It doesn’t know about us or a bug. It doesn’t care. It just does what it can and what it is supposed to. That is why a water droplet hugs a bug’s wings and doesn’t let go and not one bug deserves it more than another. She kept quiet for a moment and asked whether there existed some creature so small that it could not break in through that force that binds water in the first place. A creature that water would not let in.
Wwwe are a-all mmmmade of wat-ter.
She never mentioned the number of bugs she saw in puddles that had already died.
One time we had a storm coming. We were both thrilled. I bought a fifty-feet length of garden hose and cut it in half. One for me and one for the fireball and we sucked on it for air and we lay at the bottom for hours watching. In the gray box of sky we saw the weaving of the universe not in truth of history but in truth of song. Rain drops bore stars in explosions and ripples reached out in concentric waves carrying portents of the start of the clock the flow of time and they migrated thousands together in the cosmic wind and they died in that journey without destination and their progeny already flowered in their trail yet were blown another direction orthogonal but on who’s whim? Maybe it was the rubbery air I breathed and perhaps it made me high but after a while at the bottom it got quiet and then after some more while you heard the waters talk. They whispered in a chant stories of storms and where they had been and had seen and where they were going and the chant followed the beat of those alien tribal drums from that jungle in the darkness within you bred by that same air of the rain of the storm. The fireball floated calmly next to you in the deep. Her hand quiet in yours and she didn’t go anywhere and neither did you.
She announced she had made a discovery with a weightless excitement I didn’t know she ever possessed that was contagious in a dangerous sort of way. Some special type of bug and it was going to be a surprise. Dusk found rain falling and the fireball stood by the plastic lounge chairs waiting with a few glass jars guarding her feet each with a roughly cut Styrofoam hat over their metal caps. I leaned over the jars and saw that the Styrofoam hats had open tops crudely shaped with a box-cutter and she had stabbed the metal caps full of holes with a fork. I picked up one jar and found the orange-headed bug in its black cloak with gold trim looking back at me through the glass without interest. She still hadn’t said anything but her big eyes followed my every movement and she pressed her lips against each other hard in an attempt to hide a smile.
Wwwhat’s so so so ssspec cial about them them?
Quick. Go to the bottom. The sun will be down soon. I will show you.
I took my rubber hose and went and at the bottom I could see her squatted by the edge of the gray box sky. She carefully plopped down each individual glass jar whose squarish Styrofoam hats kept them afloat like buoys and righted themselves against the zephyr of the evening. Then she slid herself down along the wall of the pool, slowly, so as not to rock the glass jars and not disturb the lives inside. She reached for my hand and slid hers inside my palm and we waited.
When it was sure enough dark, when the raindrops could not be told but through the disturbance of the shadows that filled the whole box sky, when the edge of our vision at our feet vibrated in a soft yellow light from the windows afar we couldn’t see, one single speck of light lit up in a jar above and then disappeared. Her little fingers tapped in the center of my palm asking if I saw it and I gave her two squeezes back. Another jar lit up in a different corner of the sky and faded and another somewhere else and another yet. She decorated our house. A house where when the night fell, the lights came on. I looked to her but the darkness at the bottom shrouded her face obscured her orange and red. At night in the deep you can’t see can’t hear can’t speak so I held her hand tighter and I squeezed it once in a while and she squeezed back without fail.
We dried our hair together with towels sitting face to face at the edge of the pool. It was late. The rain had stopped.
Amm-mazing. Th-thank you. Thank you.
The little fireball smiled and didn’t answer. One by one she took off the Styrofoam hats from the glass jars once again spread around her. She twisted off the metal caps and the little pilots of auspice rose from the jars and we watched them find their way in dotted curves to what unknown destination. I asked her why it was she sat by the edge of the pool the other day and cried alone in the rain. She dipped her head. She said her daddy beat her mommy. I twirled the words on my tongue a long time, tried to smooth them, tried to calm them.
Sommmetimes p-people love anon-other in wways haaard to rrreceive. When we sspeak the sa-same langua-guage, we don’t spea-eak the ssame l-language. God se-et us apar-part. We fffind ea-each othe-other again through Hi-Him.
I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was going to pass out. Finally she looked up at me and she nodded as if she understood. We sat in silence for some more.
Once in a while I had a good day as well believe it or not. I cleaned my apartment. I sang songs in my head. I made a pot of coffee. I even called a friend on the phone. The day was too hot that trees looked wavy outside the window and buildings seemed unsure of themselves. I walked to the pool during siesta time in the screams of cicadas and the absence of children’s laughter and no sound of water splashing. Perfect it was. It brought a smile to my face to glimpse a subtle shade of orange at the far end in the deep of a reflected powdery blue sky that I wasn’t familiar with but felt welcomed by. I stepped over the fence onto the scorching tiles baked incandescent white by the sun and flung my things and I said Ca-ca-cannon ––––– !
The sudden cool on my skin was fantastic and it chilled me to the bones creasing the folds at the back of my neck. I did get the ball of the ca-ca-cannonball out but in water and I took in a gaspful through the nose and windpipe and I coughed all kinds of bubbles that flowered in front of my face in many directions. In all that busyness I saw the blurred figure of her upside down so I must have been upside down so I flipped around but then I saw that the powdery blue box of the sky was down by my feet. A thing tapped me at my hairline and it was an end of a garden hose not quite floating neither did it sink just there watching like some curious sea animal first encountering the human shape and its friendliness found no expression for its lack of word or gesture. Why are we upside down? I swam to her. Her mouth was slightly open, one tooth missing. Her eyes were pointed at me totally still, each pupil a dark tunnel to somewhere even more hid. There was no expression on her freckled face, frozen, a portrait of her in nowhere at all. A fistful of frizzled orange and red carelessly shoved inside the drainpipe just above her head.
I got out and picked up my scattered things. The tiles cooked blisters on the bottom of my feet as I walked away. I locked the apartment door and drew the curtains. I drew a cold bath but the tub was too small for my caprice.
It rained. Now I only open the window and smell it. The rich must of earth and all that walks it dripping. Fellow creatures of the rain. Those who don’t know about evra-pro-ration. Those who probably don’t even know about the sun.
Beautifully written!