The Beauty in the Rain (Murphamy)

The Beauty in the Rain

Murphy knew he should not have trusted the weatherman. The sky was not clear as promised, not painted with brilliant shades of yellow and pink like Murphy had hoped. Instead rain fell heavy from the dark grey sky, pounding on the windshield of the car like horse's hooves on a racetrack.

Murphy sighed as he pulled his car up to the edge of a precipice that looked over a vast sheet of rolling sea. He had nicknamed this spot "Murphy's Special Spot," because despite its striking beauty, nobody seemed to go there but him.

Murphy had been coming to his special spot since he was a kid. Whenever his mother was having a particularly hard day and it seemed the only thing she had the capacity to do was hurt her son and drink, Murphy would pedal his bright red bicycle as far away from his house as he possibly could. But Murphy didn't ride just any bicycle. He rode the Condor Junior Roadracer his dad had hand-built for him in their garage only months before he passed away.

It was with his dad that Murphy had first come to his special spot. Despite it being so many years ago, Murphy remembered the evening perfectly. He remembered the way the ice cold root beer his dad had bought him contrasted against the heat of his sweaty palm, the way he sat pressed against his father's side, both of them dangling their feet off the edge of the monstrous cliff.  As Murphy got older, however, the cliff seemed to slowly decrease in size until it was at a height Murphy felt he could confidently dive off. His father had always effortlessly dove off the cliff, whooping and cheering as he plummeted into the deep ocean below, but Murphy had always been too frightened.

"Come on John, give it a try!" his father would call, his head bobbing above the surface of the water. Murphy would always reply with a giggle and a simple shake of his head.

It had been exactly eight years since his father had died, and Murphy had planned to do it tonight, to drive to his special spot, to finally take the leap and, against the backdrop of a cloudless sunset, show his father how brave he had become. Yet, as he sat in the driver's seat of his rickety old pick-up truck and looked out on the foggy horizon, unable to tell where the grey sea ended and the grey sky began, Murphy felt anything but brave.

When he was young his mother, back when she would only have a glass of red wine with dinner, had always told him the rain was beautiful. Murphy would huff and stomp, frustrated over the fact the wind howling through the trees and the droplets of water falling from the sky prevented him from playing at the park.
"Find beauty in the rain," his mother would call from the kitchen, her voice soft and sweet like honey, just loud enough so Murphy could hear it over the constantly running tap of the kitchen sink. Then, she would light the fireplace, curl up next to Murphy on the couch by the window, and read aloud to him until he fell asleep.

Murphy had yet to find beauty in the rain. Now, all it made him think about was the version of his mother he had lost. For a brief moment Murphy rested his head against the steering wheel, his long, unkempt brown hair hanging over his eyes. That was until his peacefulness was interrupted by frantic tapping on his car door. Murphy snapped his head up in annoyance and through his rain-covered window, was met with the sight of a familiar dark-haired man knocking wildly on the glass, a look of desperation in his eyes.

"Bellamy?" Murphy said as he rolled down his window, his tone heavy with indignation, "what the hell do you want?" Murphy's chest began to fill with a sense of irritation and dread not only at the fact his secret spot had been found out, but also the fact his arch nemesis was the one that had found it.

--

Murphy and Bellamy had started as great friends in elementary school, playing tag on the playground and building elaborate forts out of branches and leaves they had found on the forest floor. But as the years wore on, and the boys grew up, Bellamy had slowly started to drift away. In high school he had integrated himself into the group of teenagers that sat at the top of the social food chain, the kind of teenagers that would call Murphy a 'fairy' and "accidentally" push him down in the hallway.