The Rain
The rain always arrived at the most inopportune moment, an uninvited and most unwelcome guest. When I refused him entry, he would sit on the porch and weep, tapping on the window panes with slender fingers until his persistence faded to bitter melancholy and he slipped between the boards into the soft earth below.
Once, when I left home to replenish my ever dwindling supply of tea and sweet biscuits, I returned to find the rain awaiting me in the parlour. I had left the windows open, thinking nothing of the possibility of an evening shower. A foolish oversight, for he had not missed this opportunity to sink into my couch and stare at me with doleful eyes. I tried, in vain, to remove him, but the damp was deep-set and could take weeks to dry. He did not remain silent.
The atmosphere, he said, was terribly lonely. A vast and empty realm of nomadic listlessness. But to descend was perhaps more tragic than to remain. On his arrival children fled indoors, or under eaves, desperate to avoid his touch. People rushed to extricate themselves from his presence, cursing him as they fled.
I must admit, I was far from guiltless, but his presence was such an unrelenting source of dreariness. He was the embodiment of self pity, and his company and conversation was inescapably mirthless. I had not once seen him smile.
It was rumoured that the rain considered himself an artful dancer, though ever partner-less he was in his solemn waltzes. He had, he told me, once caressed the diminutive torso of a wayward ballerina as she desperately attempted to protect her garments from the downpour. He assured me it was the closest he had ever been to content.
So, when his visitations grew too common and too unbearable, I sought to appease him. As the clouds grew thick in the air above, I cast myself onto the lawn and ducked and weaved and twirled in an artless dance of utter desperation. He laughed, and though the force of it stunned me, I continued. As his mirth lit up the sky, a flash of a smile between tight lips, I took his hands. It was far from elegant, and as an ill-fitted pair we lacked discipline, but his enthusiasm for the motions was inspired. Though the neighbors peeped from under curtains, we continued to spin, undaunted by their curiosity, until the pair of us collapsed into the grass. We stayed there till the sun returned.
Though the rain remained his melancholic self, from that day on I seldom left him by the door. I’d put Tchaikovsky on the gramophone and together we’d leave our dripping footsteps on the carpet in an ungainly mockery of ballet. I found there was nothing so truly liberating as a rain-dance.
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