Editor's Note:
This is the first of three installments of “The Magic Rain,” a series of short stories by the author.
My grandmother looked out the window at the falling rain. She sighed, slowly tilting her rocking chair to the side as she gazed into the glowing light of street lamps shadowed by a darkened sky. Grandma often told me those lamps were steel sentinels that guarded the city from darkness.
She looked at me, smiling. A light flashed across her eyes, fiercely, and it felt like a surge of energy left her body and jumped into mine.
“There’s magic in the rain, Eli. There’s magic when we die.”
I was ten years old when my grandmother died. For some, this is a singular event. For others, it means little. I couldn’t say that it was either, truthfully. It all comes and goes in a haze of blurred color and sounds. I saw family from long past file in and out our doors. I couldn’t understand why everyone was so sorry. She just died. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. That’s what happens when you get old. I was only ten years old.
I hated how no one really knew what to say to me.
“So how ya’ doing, Eli?”
“You holding up okay, sport?”
“You don’t really know what’s going on, do you?”
Everyone had something to say. The truth is I was lost in my head. I saw them but I didn’t register their voices or empathies. I hid from everyone the first chance I had. There was a closet in the back bedroom I would go to when I needed to be alone. It wasn’t big at all and it was full of clothes and boxes. On the floor was a pile of blankets, most of them homemade by various aunts and even one by my grandmother who was now dead. I would lie on top of the blankets and snuggle into them, scared by the enveloping dark as I shut the door.
I cried.
I had never cried before that I could remember. The tears stung my eyes, chilling my cheek as they first slowly ebbed, then gaining rapidity, zigzagged and fell to the folded blankets underneath. Mucus overflowing from my nose back into my throat made me choke. I was coughing and spitting all the while crying and unable to breathe. It was a terrible feeling, one that I had never known. The worst part was it was coupled with the bitter taste of loss.
The realization that I had lost something I never knew I needed was damaging. It was damaging to my young mind, to my gentle heart and the tenacity of my childhood. I felt that I couldn’t go on. It didn’t make sense. I was only a child who shouldn’t have had to deal with these emotions.
I was only ten years old.
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