The Rain

The Rain

unfinished work
28 December 1987

17 years old

The day started bright and sunny, and the sun felt warm on my neck as I weeded my garden. It was energizing. You could shout, “Hey, you up there, setting the controls in the heart of the sun! Energize me!” And sure enough, it would happen. Then, as the day grew shorter and the shadows longer, and the sun warmer, the rain started, almost without warning. First, the sun disappeared for a few seconds, and the birds stopped singing. Then, there was a loud clap of thunder, so loud, in fact, it made my ears ring for twenty minutes after. And immediately following was a torrential downpour of rain, drenching everyone who was outdoors and enjoying the beautiful weather in a matter of seconds.

I ran inside after gathering my tools, cussing loudly at the weatherman who promised nothing but what we’d had for all of three hours that morning to last all day, not to mention all week. If there was going to be rain, it should have happened later in the week, when I had nothing better to do than to watch it.

It was a perfect first day of June, and my first day of summer break after introducing mealy-mouthed freshmen college students to first-year psych, most of whom were only taking the course to complete a graduation requirement. It was also my first year of teaching, and what a year that was. I was nearly ecstatic when the last final had been handed in and graded. It was a year of firsts, all right. I was hoping my first summer break would be the start of a better second school year.

At the least, I’d know what I was doing next time around.

I ran inside the house under the cover of my windbreaker. At least it kept me from getting soaked, which is more than I can say for my neighbours. Once inside, I threw the jacket over a chair and went through the kitchen to the garage, where I deposited my gardening tools. (I’d found gardening to be a relaxing hobby in my high school years, despite demeaning rumours of my questionably masculinity, and was able to keep it up during my college career, thus improving my agricultural skills. I’ve been able to impress many a female, over the past ten years or so, with my opulent gardens and well-manicured lawns, not to mention my home, which no doubt must resemble something of a jungle upon first glance.”

I made myself lunch, and had a beer or two as I started to read a novel I’d recently bought, mostly for the sake of acquiring an impressionable library, rather than for the sake of literacy. I quickly grew bored (I was never much of a reader) and threw the book aside as I spied my forgotten windbreaker carelessly draped over the chair. I walked over to it, picked it up, and hung it in the closet, and returned with a towel to wipe up the mess.

As I approached the chair, I noticed the fabric looked as if it were… steaming. Cautiously, I drew closer and reached out to touch it. Could it be really that hot? I felt the heat growing in intensity as I got nearer, and it appeared to have a faint, green aura about it. Stunned, I backed into the kitchen and the floor seemed to sink as I stepped onto it. It felt spongy, like well-nourished earth.

I looked down and saw that I had stepped into a puddle of water I’d left while returning my tools to the garage. Only it wasn’t water anymore, it was a viscous pool of shining, black liquid. The linoleum was steaming also, and that was when I realized the stuff was burning a hole in my floor.

I gave a tremendous shriek as I felt the heat bore through my shoe and into my foot. Jerking my foot out of my shoe, I staggered back and fell on the table. I climbed on top and sat there, feeling safe, at least for the time being, inspecting the damage to my foot. There was none. Much to my relief, the liquid didn’t touch my foot at all, which was more than I could say for my shoe—I had no shoe left. It had been eaten through and now a hole was forming in the floor in the shape of my sneaker.

Three hours and eight holes later, I finally summoned the courage to get off the table and see how my neighbours were doing. Under the circumstances, I decided it would be best to enquire in person, rather than call, as I would have normally done. If I called, a number of things could have happened; the one standing out most in my mind was the possibility of electrocution. Don’t ask me why such a thought occurred to me, because I don’t very well know, myself. It just seemed to be a logical precaution to take.

Digging through my closet and avoiding contact with any “water” that may have been left over from the outside, I found an old overcoat I’d used in graduate school. Donning it, I walked out the back door with a pair of rubber galoshes on my feet, which my mother had thoughtfully given me my first day of college, warning about keeping my feet dry. I was hoping that they would serve their purpose after fifteen years of sitting in the back of all those closets, neglected, never used even once except to transport alcohol from dorm room to dorm room.

The rain had stopped not more than five minutes later after it started. The flora I had so meticulously tended to for the past two years was nothing but a smouldering, reeking mass of ashes sitting uselessly atop the muddy, black earth I hoed and fertilized so lovingly. “What the hell is going on here?” I said aloud as I trudged through the muck and mire left over from the rain, if it was rain.

I reached the door of my closest neighbour, and my closest friend. I didn’t bother knocking, it was a tradition we both believed should become obsolete between friends after a period of time. I walked in, knowing beforehand that the door would not be locked.

I walked in, expecting to find George sitting at his customary place before his trusty old Underwood, but to my mild surprise, he wasn’t there. I called out his name. “George? George! Hey, buddy! Where the hell are you? Have you seen what that rain has done to my trees? George?”

I searched the house trying to find him, and finally made it to the basement stairs. “George, are you down there?”

He had to be. I took the first step cautiously, remembering the story George once told me about the previous owner, and obese old woman who fell right through the stairs going down to fetch some reserves and needless to say, she broke her neck and died. Since then, although I definitely wasn’t fat, I was always wary about going down those stairs, or any stairs, for that matter.

I turned on the light and suddenly frightened, I threw my caution to the wind and ran down the stairs hearing the stairs creak beneath my slight weight, and expecting them to give way at any moment.

When I reached the bottom, I saw George. The sigh scared the shit out of me, because he didn’t look like George was supposed to look. George was a man who could take on any task or perform any deed, however heroic or grotesque, and come out not only alive but completely unruffled, as if he simple came back from the library. The George I saw in the basement that afternoon was cowering in a corner, armed with an arsenal of various weapons: two butcher knives, a Magnum .45, the axe I’d returned to him two days before, and an assortment of other household products, including four cans of Raid and two bottles of disinfectant, and toilet cleaner.

George’s face was pale and frightened and shadowed over by a thick cloud of panic. I ran to him, calling out his name. “George! What the hell is going on here? What happened to you? George! George! Answer me, damn you!”

When he didn’t answer me, I slapped him a couple of times trying to break him out of his daze. Seeing that that wasn’t going to work, I hefted him to his feet and literally dragged him up the stairs.

When we reached his room and I dropped him onto the bed, George started to thrash and scream as if something was trying to get at him. I jumped on top of him, trying to restrain his movement so that he would break himself or anything else for that matter. This time, instead of just slapping him around a little, I really decked him one, and that seemed to break him out of his daze. He came to with hazy eyes, and a general sense of confusion.

“What the hell was going on back there?” I demanded. “I walked into the house expecting you to be working away on your book as usual, and I can’t find you anywhere. And on more of a whim than anything else, I go down into the basement, and find you cowering in a corner armed with various weapons, looking like you’d just seen the end of the world. What the hell is going on?”

I was thoroughly upset and frightened, myself.