Black Rain

Grace couldn’t sleep. She lay in the big bed in the spare room of her Grandmother’s house, covered in pillows of scratchy felt her Grandmother had made. The big window covered one wall; the heavy curtains were drawn and motionless, holding the dust in their thick folds. Beside the bookshelf stood her desk, on which a small glass lamp was used as a paperweight for the stacks of pencil sketches of tulips and lavender and drawing books that littered the workspace. Paint brushes dripped inky water that slowly seeped into the desk. Her grandmother’s house had barely changed since her childhood.

When Grace was four she used to skip through the garden of foxgloves and swing upside down from the low branches of the orange tree growing near the back fence. When Violet was ten the little house with the big oak tree at the end of the street became surrounded by modern houses with slanted rooves and walls of concrete, subdivisions were built with colourless brick units that all looked the same. The white birch trees growing along the street were cut down and now garbage bins sat on nature strips were the trees once grew. Despite all this, her grandmother’s house never changed, the foxgloves and roses still bloomed and the oak tree grew ever taller.

 Grace threw off the heavy doona and stared up at the lightshade. She listened to the heavy droplets of rain fall on the tin roof, gradually getting heavier as they slid through the leaves of the oak tree before landing like marbles on the roof. The ancient trunk of the oak tree grew very close to the back wall of the house, the thick branches stretched out covering the small house from back door to porch step like a great umbrella.

A hundred heavy feet danced on the roof, distant thunder an echoing applause from over the town. It was a hot night, and Grace longed for the cold rain she danced in as a child. She went to the big window, pulled aside the heavy curtains, pushed open the window and clambered out.

She landed on her feet, just missing the garden overrun with hollyhocks and parsley. Feeling the soft bristles of the freshly cut grass between her toes, she ran beneath the great oak that sheltered the house in its great arms. She tripped over a root that poked rudely from the earth and stained the knees of her pyjamas with green smudges from the grass. It was then that Grace felt the rain.

The water was warm. She expected the cold iciness that she had always loved, not this. The soft moonlight made her pale skin glow; she looked at her bare arms where thin snakes of black water slithered and dripped from her skin. Violet looked up to the sky, but there were no stars, just black cloud. An emptiness of rippling blackness illuminated by the moon behind it; white veins of moonlight wound through the cloud like quartz in black rock.

Grace looked up at the oak tree. The black rain streamed through the leaves like draining water from a cooking pot, but the leaves moved and twisted away from them. The droplets sprayed down in all directions like water from a broken showerhead.  Black water pooled on the ground before it slithered off into the grass like leeches. She tried to wipe the rain from her skin, swiping at her bare arms and legs, stumbling backwards under the safety of the oak.

She searched through sheets of black rain to the neighbour’s house, the Thompson’s, but the only light was a white light left on in the kitchen window. The next house was Old Mrs Arlington’s unit. But all she could see was the outdoor light that flickered wildly. She turned around and looked back to her grandmother’s house. Grace looked to the window of her Grandmother’s room at the front of the house. The window was shut and the grey curtains drawn. Grace looked up to the sky once more. The air was thick and smelled rancid, like that of water that had stayed in a gutter for too long. Black water streamed down on Grace, drenching her from head to toe and slowly greying the colour of her blue pyjamas.

A strong wind picked up and tugged violently at her hair, making her stumble and fall over the oak tree’s roots once again. The wind began to pull at the black cloud, spreading it across the sky like not enough butter over too much bread, leaving behind Grace, wet and staring up at the stars that shone through the dissolving cloud. Hundreds of silver eyes blinking down at a girl dressed in wet black pyjamas.