Seven Days of Rain

 

Day .1.

Her onyx hair falls to the gengle curve of her collarbones. Her brown eyes stare attentively.

There are cracks in a window, and a dim light is seeping through the thinning glass.

Her breath fogs the pane.

It is only when the soft rainfall begins, and the glass trembles, that she pulls herself from the sill at last.

It isn't the normal sort of rain. No. It's been brewing for many months. Building, she thinks, not in the sky, but somewhere else.

When Molly Taylor died last year--Ellen Johanson the year before--the now 9-year-old girl began to grow wary. Every year it was one girl. Just one, sable-eyed girl. And this girl began to tell stories. Grotesque and eccentric tales of darkness and demons that seemed doubtful even to herself. And yet she knew that they were true, somehow, like one knew when a fire was about to start or a storm about to begin.

Driven to insanity, she was dead before the end of the week.

 The result was one full week of rain.

Now the time had come again. Annually, for seven straight days, the rain came in a breathtaking, beautiful torrent, paling the Town's skies to a pallid and unnatural white. 

Only this time, she can feel it. It lives inside the marrow of her bones and the fragile birdcage of her ribs, pounding against her skull like a heartbeat. And she doesn't go outside to play in the rain when morning comes, marvelling at it's faultlessness like the other children.

Even as they say--"Come outside, it's starting, it's starting!"--she remains unnerved, the falling droplets burning perpetually into the backs of her eyelids. 

And as they catch the raindrops on their tongues and spin in circles with their arms outstretched, she can do nothing, nothing but stare until her parents fetch her for dinner. She is too perturbed to eat. 

For she can feel these these things coming on, understand the emotions of the girls who now lay buried in their graves. 

And somehow she knows that even night will not darken the waxen-colored rain, because somehow, the rain isn't  rain at all. 

Day .2.

The quiet, callow girl is shaken by nightmares that night. 

Even so, she can feel her mother's cold hands upon her spine from the outside, fingernails digging ever so slightly into her flesh.

She says, "I love you, darling."

Then her hands move to her throat. 

"But what have you done with my daughter?" 

Day .3.

In the next two days, the girl is forced to attend school, despite her lack of well being. She pleads sickness. She pleads tiredness. But she is shooed out the door with a swift and dismissive slight of hand, an umbrella clutched over head as though her life depends on it.

Which, she supposes, it does. 

Her steps are tentative as she makes her way toward the school. With each, a pair of white tennis shoes make a delicate smacking sound, a painful reminder of the liquid terror that is all around her.