The Black Rain

CW: Death, body horror

Outside was losing light as a man stared at the black waters through a window. He limped down to the pavement with a sealed cardboard box in his hands. A crowd of distorted faces formed, conversations of him.

“Mother’s beggar,” said a blonde girl.

“As nasty as a maggot, you are,” from her father.

“Curse you! I pity your children and theirs,” came from a voice among the faces. “And your mother, too—oh, she’s clapping for you from the forest isn’t she? Curse her! Curse her, too!”

A crow caught a wrinkled wrap mid-air, then landed on a traffic signal pole. It had turned red. Unlike the man he’d been at sixty, he listened, then limped on.

The city people had known the land for but six hundred moons, yet their creations had already swallowed the forest people’s traditions and soil. They had been warned. Oh, the first city people were warned against turning loam to cement and willows to houses; warned that the black rain would punish them, that it would return the land to Mother.

Rain had not visited the city in forever, and the trees had greyed, yet they lived on. Gulls had stopped stealing, sunlight had cooled and dimmed, yet they lived on. Too young to bud, and too old to live, they were.

Ignorance and youth. Man and woman. Life and death. Woof!

Passing trucks dusted the air. He coughed, then walked down the stairs. Retracted umbrellas, folded chairs, squealing children, the black waters. The black waters. He winced and swallowed a scraping lump at the sight.

It hadn’t stopped raining since the city came. It hadn’t stopped raining inside me… a black rain. I’ve starved and stilled for days to see Josh. Still, it rained on—and called to you. Woof!

He took off his cracked sandals, then stepped onto the sand. Cold and foreign. The black rain screamed as he limped on. To his right and left, he saw fellow old souls already returning to the stairs, their boxes drifting as far as the still waters allowed.

A soft hand patted his leg, but he didn’t bother looking. “It’s getting dark, old man. The waters’ll drown you. That’s one less parasite in the city, anyway. Ha-ha.”

Then another hand patted his back, a hard one. “There’s a black storm in my heart, a pure soul in my box there.”

He cranked his head around, and his bones cursed at him. He thought he’d caught a glimpse of another old soul, and he was sure he did. Because he saw the sleeve of a leather jacket, and nobody wore leather jackets to the sand but old souls. Because wearing shorts or strings around their bodies on the sand was considered appropriate and revolutionary.

Ignorance-clad minds, eh?

Only he was on the sand now.

Then the wind came, gentle, low, barely stirring the white hair on his knee. Waves followed, kissing his ankles, and so he stood still. The black rain had turned to daggers that punctured his vessels. The waters faded into the sky as the clouds sank into the sand. Sound blackened, as did his vision. His consciousness oozed through his follicles, yet he still stood—aware or unaware.

Something jumped inside the cardboard box.

Eh?

Something alive had been put in that box and he wouldn’t forgive himself if he had simply forgotten doing so. The daggers scraped his ribs and screeched as he lowered the box; the air suffocated his organs. He had no time to break the seal. He laid the box upon the skin of the black waters and pushed it as far from himself as he could. Then his head hit the sand.

A handful of gazes touched his back from behind curtains and blinds far across the streets. Lamps were turned on, children’s eyes covered, words sharpened. Ice cream decorated the pavement as crows dove in for bits of wafer and lifted away. A woman slipped off her leather jacket and draped it onto a plastic chair. She sat on it, took a sip of water, then another. The newspaper untouched, she crossed her arms and sighed at the man lying lifeless on the sand. The ice stilled, her buttock sore, a man then joined her. They held hands and examined the dead man from afar, like anyone else on the pavement. Then they left, limping in different directions.

Subjectively he was dead; objectively, he had fainted. He found himself lying at the foot of the stairs. The daggers had quieted. He clutched the handrail and tried to stand, but his legs were too weak now. He stared at the waters. The boxes were still close enough to the sand to see, and he finally noticed the crowd around him and their murmurs.

Then a black liquid splatted on the handrail, steamed it, then holed it. More hit the buildings, and screeches painted the air crimson. Trucks crashed into poles and birthed flames; skyscrapers leaned and roared, then erupted streets after streets. The city people thrashed about with holes on and in their bodies—their eyes boiled, meaty fingers detached, jaws lingered from rotting vines of the remains of their skin. A few dashed to the black waters and threw in things they cherished. Things they believed would carry their memories onward. Things they believed the waters would carry with ease.

“Ignorance and youth. Woof!” The man shouted and smiled.

For the first time, it rained in the city. For the first time he smiled, then the black rain blotted his brown skin and his mind.

A brown boy hummed a melody and skipped along dotted bodies and sodden boxes. Then he tripped on one. His brows furrowed, he called to his sister, and they both tore to shreds the poor box labeled VINCENT. They yelped at its contents, then ran back to me.

On the sand were pictures of two brown boys under a willow, their boogers visible, faces stern, dried beetles and mealworms on sticks and a—

Woof!