It will rain on the final page of this story, if a story this is. I don’t know if a lover will die, a small town will flood, its shops and neat parks cleansed to zero, or that the planet will finally end in one of those biblical clichés worthy of artless graffiti and sandwich boards. I don’t know a thing, except that it will rain. But something about this rain isn’t right. It’s a rain that I seem to know, an ending I’m vaguely familiar with for no good reason. I don’t want it to rain, whatever else happens. I have no plans for rain on the last page but it will rain.
I can talk about the sun. How it doesn’t always like us, doesn’t always rise when we think it does. That it refuses to bring us light because we don’t live in the light, how the glow went out of a man’s heart, how a deranged woman used the sun to heal herself and kill others, how summer and its roses never forgave that blazing star for giving too much to an ungrateful world. Or I could talk about angels, which are seldom the children of rain, how they can’t help, why they watch you lose what you love, these angels, idealized fragments of light, sorry souls of the impotent harp as Rilke might have put it.
And then my story might quietly end without rain, you would think. Yet, the rain will have its way, I know this. Old and hacking in this bed, I know.
Why the unstoppable rain? Is its sound, which I can already hear in the distance, shouting, you there, you’re so good at holding on, managing your endings, until you can’t. Vaguely familiar rain means my death, or the death of certainty, is it fact or metaphor? What if I give in to the rain and make it the warm water of a lover’s dream, or the rain on the morning of someone’s birth, or the rain itself dreaming of sunbreak or its unrequited gifts to the earth? What if it rains on my old age, washing me in a cool current to the past, to my youth? Will that do or will the rain simply choose its own terms and context? If I refuse to finish this story will the story finish itself in a virtuoso moonlight performance? When I wake up, if I wake up, what will I find?
With moist lips and damp hair I can feel the rain approaching but I will sleep now and let it have its way. Rain does not change, it is only recycled. It fell on Babylon, Jerusalem, Athens, which did not write their stories, the rain did. Now it falls on me, same moisture, different alphabet. A story I will tomorrow read, or never. I may dream but it won’t matter. I am not in charge, nor is God, here, flailing his skinny arms atop these storyless sheets of vaguely familiar rain.
This miniature originally appeared in Decameron Vol. 1, 2014.
