The Rain Gods

It rained.
         Mark didn’t particularly mind the rain. It was nice, in a way, to have the constant patter of drops all around him, dousing the earth in wave after wave of quiet and grey. Other people hated it, of course. Mostly the adults. His mother, especially. She could remember a time before the war, a time when there was sunshine—she could remember the feel of its warmth on her face. Some days the rain seemed to make her melt, leaving nothing but a mess in her bed for Lillian to comfort and some days it made her angry, throwing things, screaming with rage. And at those times, Mark stepped outside onto the porch and watched the rain fall and wished that he knew why it hurt her so much.
         Once, she had tried to tell him, when he was younger and Lillian was still just a baby. They had been sitting on the swing, wrapped up in blankets, listening to the night downpour, and she had spoken to him abruptly, her quiet voice strange.
         ‘There used to be stars,’ she said, and he looked at her. ‘There used to be stars and a moon and a sun and blue sky, but now they’re gone.’ After that she didn’t say anything for a long time but sat brooding, her eyes fixed on the darkness outside the columns.
         ‘We used to go stargazing,’ she continued suddenly, and her voice held the dreamy cast of memory. ‘On clear nights, we would go outside and watch the stars on the rocks by the sea. There was an island, you know, where we went. And my father and I, we would go up first and some nights we would go out and just stare up at the moon and the stars on the rocks. It was beautiful. The moon reflected on the water and the waves made it dance—I would pretend that they were selkies or mermaids, playing with their lanterns just beneath the surface.’ She laughed, and it was a different laugh—not her usual, merry one, but one that was strangely melancholy and bitter. ‘I spent far too much time pretending.’
         ‘What did the stars look like?’
         His mother smiled and held him close, so that he could feel Lillian’s soft baby breath on his face. ‘Like the past, love. Like the past.’
         But that was years ago and his mother had changed, with this rain—she was eroding like the mountains, drowning in a sea that he couldn’t save her from. Sometimes he would hear, through the gentle quiet of the house, the piano playing, or a few swift, sad strokes on the violin. Once he went and watched her as she sat by the window and played, and her face was so sad that he couldn’t watch for very long She looked so very much like a ghost, sitting there on the piano bench, her fingers stroking the keys, that he was afraid if he looked for too long she would disappear and never return again except as a shadow on the wall.
         Thud.
         He loved his mother, loved her so much, because she was to him what the world once was, the world that he never knew and never understood and would never remember because he didn't live it. She was the stars that she spoke of so longingly, the sun that had once slipped past the clouds (burned them right out of the sky). She was the wind, the wave, the rain. That was how it was. He and Lillian were both there to orbit her, to watch as she smiled and laughed, to wait for that moment when she dashed herself upon the rocks one too many times. They are children enraptured by the ballerina on the stage, the one who is so bright and beautiful when the light is on her, and who fades slowly, though she does not mean to, who, when it all is over and the dust on the stage is settling, is merely a thin girl in satin Pointe shoes, untying her hair and going home to a house that cannot compare to the ballet. She was one of the things in his life that Mark couldn’t lose, could never lose, even if she loses herself.
         Thud.
         Every third Thursday of the month, they went out to the cemetery and, as he and Lillian huddled under the umbrella, his mother stood in the cold and the wet and kissed the flowers before placing them on the freezing ground. Sometimes they ran into others, there, honoring those who lie beneath the dirt, never identified, only a hope that it was their families in the mass grave, that they had found the right place.
         'Who's under there, mother?' Lillian asked once, her young voice already formal and clipped. Their mother smiled and sighed.
         'Sometimes I wonder,' was all she said and then they got in the car and drove away, back to the house with the porch, back to their quiet little life, uninterrupted, existing forever.
         Thud.
         He wondered why he was thinking of her, now, of all times, as another bullet met flesh, burying itself deep within the skulls of his friends, lined up, silent as lambs. As the girl's corpse was pulled away and roughly added to the pile of bodies, he saw his mother’s hair and heard her voice and half-smiled when he realized that he would never see her again, and realized that maybe it wouldn’t matter so much, because wherever he went she would have to be. He knew it.
         The line was getting shorter.
         Thud.
         He had asked her, once, what was after death, because he had heard the reports of the cullings. For a long time, she had been quiet, and then she said, slowly, ‘Sunshine, and warmth, and winter, and summer, and cold, and water, and clear days, and blue skies, and stars, and the moon, and lightning, and the sound of surf. There are leaves in the trees and light coming through them, and there are fish in the streams and frost on the window and white cloud castles. And people won’t make war and they won’t come along to tell you who else is gone, and everyone you’ve ever loved will be there. And at night you can take walks under the full moon and going swimming in the ocean without any clothes, and in the morning you can wake up at dawn and watch the sun rise.’ She stopped for a moment and looked at him. ‘It’s anything you want it to be.’
         ‘Are those people who died happy?’
         ‘Yes.’
         ‘Will you be there?’
         She nodded and laughed, a long, happy sound that echoed through the houses and chased away the shadows. ‘Yes,’ she said, holding him close. ‘Yes.’
         Thud.
         The boy in front of him was being pulled up, pressed against the wall, his blond curls covering his eyes, soaked with rain. Mark watched, his heart slowing down, until it seemed forever between each beat, as the gun was raised, placed against his temple and then, with a sickeningly soft noise, fired. Mark watched him fall and his mother spoke in his head, as she did that morning, her voice strange and twisted.
         ‘You and Lillian have to go. It’s better…better than starving. There are too many. So please…do this for mother. It won’t hurt, not for long. I promise.’
         He hoped that she was right.
         Thud.
         His mother read him poetry sometimes, on those long days when there was nothing left to do, and the songs had been sung and the books had been read and there was no more music or joy to be pulled out of anything. Her favorite was always Robert Frost, and even now, as his arms were grabbed roughly and he was pushed into the brick, Mark could hear her voice, quiet and sure, reading out the lines as though she were stroking the hair of a child.
         ‘There is safety in words,’ she said, caressing the pages of her anthology, her eyes closed, contented. ‘They cannot be destroyed so easily as with flame.’
         A gun barrel, still burning from its last shot, pressed into his temple and, abruptly, he remembered that she didn’t always hate the rain, that sometimes she would sit by him at the window and look out and smile.
         ‘Can you hear them?’ She said.
         ‘Hear who?’           
         The trigger was pulled.
         ‘The rain gods. They’re singing.’
         Thud.
         It rained.