One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks Read Free Book Online

with an unfamiliar name. She imagines the things trembling, as she holds them. Why, to the cruel god of china and glass, must this be their fate? Her faithless and inevitable hands.
    It doesn’t matter how careful she is. If she makes sure the stemware sits in the extreme inner part of the counter waiting its turn she breaks the glasses in the wash. Reaching out absentmindedly to put something back on the table she misses the surface entirely and over it goes. Once she broke a glass, a thick leaded tumbler, simply by banging it down on the table too hard. She isn’t even always drunk, although that certainly adds to the carnage.
    She carries her latest victim to the alley. Useless now, like so many other things. Outside it is raining again. Rain, what a democratic notion. Rain covers everything, even her mistakes, with a fine misting, a bumpy covering in the perpetual stand and motion of liquid. Rain is arrested, stilled in its ceaseless trajectory. Rain that bells taut against an internal suspension, wanting fruitlessly to escape itself.
    She leaves rain to it. She abandons her loved and broken things to the wet.

38.
    Yesterday she and the child plodded from street to street as usual, dodging puddles, dampening. Inside a steamy café she bought her child a hot milk. The woman at the next table was gruff and heavyset, ignoring them. Faintly traced moustache. Oh yes. Her child whined and wriggled and spilt the milk. She fixed him with a Look but to no avail.
    Outside the rain continued, the rain in which their coast specializes. It dropped steadily onto the world, all-pervasive, impossible to ignore. She began to pretend. She imagined leaning forward and speaking to the woman, the two of them laughing. The woman would find her child adorable. Now the sun came out, the three of them would walk out together, the adults’ shoulders almost touching. Later she’d get to see her naked, the stranger from the café.
    On a sunny day a couple of years ago, she remembered, they sat in another coffee place like this one: she, her son, and M. She and M engaged to be married. Outside, so M the sun worshipper could take in the few rays. The child was on her lap, drinking hot chocolate. For a moment she allowed herself to picture the three of them, the fine family they made, to imagine the envy of everyone who saw them. Then the child turned and, without warning, vomited brown all over the front of her coat.
    She remembers the limitless blue of the sky, that day.

39.
    M kept a couple of old ponchos in the back of the Land Rover, tucked into their pouches. Probably they’re there still. When rain came unexpected M would bring the jackets around to the front for them to wear.
    In other respects M ignored rain as she ignored her surroundings wholesale. M had an ability, wilful it was, not to notice what was around her: stained carpet, furniture that cut into the backs of your thighs, the damp reaching in from outside. Padding barefoot onto the cold floor of the front porch on wet nights. Carrying her one giant drink. M liked drink, just not much of it; but it was in vain that she explained rum and Coke was unsuitable for cold weather.
    Outside, wet licked at the stucco of the house. Lichen crawled up and around its edges. The wet window box balanced on the rail, empty but for soil, soaked it up day after day. Then the bottom gave out finally and the contents collapsed over the path. They skirted it for weeks, leaving the floorless box there, in the sky above.

40.
    She listens to rain running rivulets into gutter and downspout, rain snaking down glass and wall. Rain trickles and gushes and goes from strength to strength. This is rain’s only desire, to gather and grow. Each raindrop dreams itself a river, rushing towards the sea. Each dribble and dash swollen into an innumerable wall of its fellows. How would the sky look, full of rain? Nothing to see but water, and the city in the bottom of an aquarium with them,