Rain Night

Berlin lived in a house on a hill overlooking a road that cut serpentine through the valley. Across the road there are cabins down in the holler. The slant of their roofs visible from the deck. One house has a white tin roof that glitters in the sun. Next door to Berlin’s small quaint white house is a brown A-frame shack that has been long forgotten by time and by people. It was once an old man’s workshop, but he died many years ago.

The large shack has a sloping roof that touches the ground on one side. The a-frame shack is situated in dense woods on a steep hill. The branches on the trees in that space are tangled and twisted, dense thickets, canopies of leaves and stands of pines along the side of the hill. Berlin used to adventure into the shack to see what the old man left behind. Old tools and dusty equipment, inside the shack. There is a blue and white sailboat parked in the weeds out front. One time she climbed into the boat only to find a soggy bed roll mattress. A drifter or squatter had been sleeping in the boat but had since moved on. No telling how long it has been there.

Before the rain came, the sky was dry, and the moon was round and bright. The rain began one night. It poured down so fast and so hard that it pounded on the roof of her little house. The rain was a roar. It slapped against the windows and poured down. The rain did not let up, not once. It was constant and relentless. The rain brought with it a storm and there was thunder, lightning. But only just for a few hours. Then the storm quieted and went away. But the rain continued to pour down on everything. Water rose from the ground upwards like a bathtub with a stopped drain.

The road became flooded which was strange because it was on the mountain side and not in a flood plain. But the water rose and soon the cabins were under water. The road became a river, rushing down. As the water rose quickly, Berlin stood under the metal awning that covered part of her deck. The rain was angry and filled with a great heavy oppressiveness. The water that fell from the sky was not in the clouds, but its origins were mysterious. When she saw the water rising and that the cabins in the holler were a lost cause and she wondered where the people had gone to get away from the river that had taken over the road, she knew she had to make a run for it. No umbrella would hold up.

Berlin donned a raincoat and left her belongings behind. But she did grab her old teddy bear—Baby Bear—and ran out the back door which opened onto a slanted hillside. She was pushed down by the rain as she ran through the woods. The ground was so wet and soggy that her feet sunk into the mud. The ground was wet with water everywhere.

Berlin made it to the boat just in time. The speed with which the water was rising was something to behold in awe struck horror. She threw her legs over the side of the old sailboat and jumped in. The water rose up the hillside and lifted the boat from what had once been a tangle of weeds and clumps of pine needles.

The rain stopped but the water was still rising somehow. It came from the earth as if a leak had sprung up where secret water had been inside of the land. Mystery water. Mystery rain.

And then she was drifting down the new river where the old road used to be. The water pulled everything onto the surface so logs and tree branches were drifting and bumping into the side of the boat. Berlin knew nothing about sailing or how to tie knots. A vision of the roofs of houses sliding by. And roofs being swallowed by water. She drifted in the boat down the mountainside.

She drifted down the new river into where the old downtown used to be. It was now water up to the roofs of the old art deco buildings. Loose junk and cars floated in the river. There was a man on the roof of the old rooftop bar, and he was the only person she saw. The boat drifted towards the old rooftop bar and got close enough that he could jump into the boat.

Hello, Berlin said.

Hello, the man replied.

But that was all they could say. They were shocked into silence and said nothing more for quite some time. The boat drifted towards the old highway, now a rushing river of rainwater that had come from the angry heavens, the old dry sky. The water had come from everywhere.

Berlin sat in the boat beside the man who finally introduced himself.

Cosmo, he said, sticking out his hand, and she took his wet hand and shook it firmly as if cementing a pact.

Berlin, she replied.

He nodded and said nothing more.

Only the tops of some trees were visible sticking out of the river, now wide and vast as an ocean of angry rain. Berlin thought about all her things, now gone forever. The things she said goodbye to. It was all buried under water by the angry rains. The flood had taken everything.

They drifted on the old highway now buried under the river of water. There were a few structures on high ground that were not entirely under water. As they drifted past the old hotel, they wanted to wave to people sitting on the roof but there were none. The water lapped against the edge of the roof as if deciding.

Berlin had a thought about the passage in Genesis with Noah and the flood. She looked for an olive branch at once, thinking it would come soon. Impatiently waiting for a sign. But she could not remember how the passage went. She had heard the Bible stories when she was a little kid but had forgotten them. It occurred to her as the light turned strange that this boat with Cosmo might be all that remained of the old dry world. She did not feel important enough to be the last woman left on earth. But the rain had come from some other world. The flood had been savaging, wild, so strange. They drifted along on the river going anywhere.

At one point she thought, this must be where the old bookstore was. She imagined all the books underwater. And how there might never again be paper with words. She had not had time to bring a book or her go bag. She had once believed in doomsday prepping as a kind of hobby. But that vision had been one of dry land and off the grid camping.

She pulled her cellphone from her pocket. The pixels on the screen, waterlogged. The night had turned to day and she had not noticed the change. It must have been the early morning when Cosmo jumped into the boat. She tried to get a signal and felt stupid for it was clear that there was no signal. The rain had washed everything away. The flood had started a new day.

She held Baby Bear in her arms, hugging him tightly and rubbed her face into his soggy wet teddy bear head. Cosmo bailed the boat out with a tin bucket. They drifted.

Berlin fell asleep for a while. How long she had been asleep was unknown since time had passed irregularly and they had no watch between them. The boat drifted for so long and the landscape was beyond recognition. Rooftops scattered here and there caught the light in sharp reflections, but most were gone.

Then it had been days since they had seen a rooftop. Now, they all were gone. Drifting down the river, the ocean of rain, the boat moved slowly along. In places it would speed up and catch a rapid or swell. There was a fishing pole in the boat and Cosmo caught a fish. They ate the fish raw.

This is life now, in this boat with a stranger who is now not a stranger to me. We have suddenly become best friends, he is everything to me, she thought.

The sun, hidden behind strange clouds, iridescent and mean. They threatened rain, having made another decision for the moment. The clouds parted and thinned revealing an angry sun that looked like how it looked in astronomy books, closer to it in outer space, an orb made of fire and hydrogen.

This is life now, she thought.

They drifted along, seeing nothing but eddies in the water and ripples and there were small waves that pushed the boat along.

Bigger waves might capsize us. They both thought.

This is life now; it began on rain night, Berlin whispers aloud.

So, what do you like to do for fun? Cosmo asks, with a twinkle in his eye, he is trying to be funny, but the humor is lost on her.

Berlin buries her face in her teddy bear and looked out on the wet horizon met with the weird sky. The clouds are purple and yellow and red and green like a bruise has been inflicted on them. Like the heavens are in some battle unknown. A war for dominion. They can only guess at what perplexities are being waged there between the forgotten waterlogged things and the utmost reaches of the firmament in colors they have never seen before.

I am not swimming in that water. She replied, fearing an undertow.

As if the earth were a vast bathtub and some angry God might suddenly pull the drain.

Everything has been buried, and we might be the only ones left. Or there might be patches of land out there, the thought leaves them both hopefuls.

She wished she could remember what Noah had to do. She always felt her prayers to God went unanswered. She was not praying sincerely enough. But that she is still alive means something. Who is this God? The boat continued to drift into a blood red sunset.

Harm reduction, Berlin thought, scoffing a bit in her mind.

What did you say? Cosmo fixes her with a compassionate stare.

The blue and white sailboat drifted along, and the light of the sun spoke in glittering reflections— messages on the surface of the water that Berlin and Cosmo must learn to read. And the sailboat drifted along on the ocean of mystery water with no dry land in sight.

Insights, once beautiful, now forgotten epiphanies I can never write, Berlin thought.

And Cosmo said, what did you say?