The Rain

Rain. Rain, again. Rain, again, again and again. Drumming and swishing and splashing, an army of ants pattering over the skylight above her bed and, outside, more ants, in wellington boots, dancing in the gutters. Gene Kelly's in his heaven, and all's wrong with the world.
 

How does it go? 'Rain, rain, go to Spain...' The fragment of rhyme runs through her head. Spain might welcome it, this unseasonable deluge, but she's had enough. Too dark and damp to call it summer, too little light to stay awake. The downpours drag her often into somnolence, a craving for warmth and comfort. She yields. Turns over and presses her face against the pillow, tugs the quilt over her ears. Searches between the rain-beats for sleep, for dreams. She dreams a dream of rain.
 

A river, somewhere in the north, her mother's country. A long, twisting, peaty stretch of water, moving slowly and smoothly between birches and reeds and mossy stones, towards a humpbacked bridge. Glinting under the water, silver-scaled salmon, speckled brown trout, black-shelled river mussels pearl-building in the dark. Mobius strips of energy, a family of eels.
 

The rain is warm and constant. Drops fall hard and heavy as coins, serial splashes disturbing the surface of the water, and in her dream she slips quickly from the cling of wet clothes and slides into the shallows. The cold water welcomes her with a slap. She dives to the bottom of the deepest pool, then surfaces slowly, following the mercury-bright bubbles of her breath as they race to meet a sky pressing down like a dirty grey blanket. She's changed by the rain, the river, into another being, another her. The otter she becomes weaves and twines round weeds and rocks, snakes her way beneath the shadow-bridge, following the river out to the sea.
 

Susie Maguire

Back to New Writing