Endless Rain Chapter 1

Endless Rain

And slowly but surely, the pauses between each and every one of his heartbeats grew longer and longer, and their echoes, softer and softer, until finally, they could no longer be heard …

Like a quick flash of light, a mere lapse in time did it seem from the moment his heart became silent to the moment she was now encased in. Under overcast skies, with a veil gently caressing her face each time a breeze passed her by, there she stood silently at the back of the church, in front of the newly erected gravestone in memory of what now lay beneath the layers of dirt and soil.

Her face wore no emotion, with neither the hint of a frown on the edge of her lips nor the sparkle of a tear in her eyes. Downward she gazed, as though looking out toward the horizon far beyond the open sea, except that present before her was nothing but earth and grass within the grasp of her fingers if she were only to care enough to kneel down to reach for them.

As groans of thunder began to echo toward her from distant skies, she bade him farewell and turned toward the same path that she had taken earlier on during her ascent up the grass-adorned hill. The black edges of her gown fluttered in the wind like the wings of a raven in flight as she made her solemn descent back down toward the town below.

Through quiet alleys and cobbled-stone streets she wandered, void of conscious purpose but subconsciously in the general pull of her home. So deep in thought was she that her senses were unnaturally late in realizing the drastic change in the atmosphere that had already occurred midway through her aimless journey.

One by one, on the ground all around, a collage of darkened spots had began to form, threatening to overshadow it entirely in due time. A sudden and ominous howl of wind was what was necessary to bring her back to her senses, at least momentarily, and without the slightest display of anxiety or worry, she readied her umbrella in her own time.

Hands moving instinctively in opposite directions, with her right hand on the lacquered wood curved handle and her left beneath the intricate ring of spokes hidden out of view, she raised the umbrella up toward the sky and opened it. As the dull sound of liquid drops dancing on the parchment canopy overhead reached her ears, she was finally able to register in her mind the identity of the curtain of water that had lowered from the skies, imposing itself upon her view of the surroundings. It had begun to rain.

Footstep after footstep, with soles continuously breaking up the surfaces of shallow puddles, she walked on and on and unknowingly found herself in the vast emptiness of the city plaza, where a dried up fountain stood in the middle of the square, surrounded by walls of individually distinct buildings in all four directions.

The fountain had been inactive for as long as she could remember, and indifferent of it had she since grown from the many times that she had walked by it, yet as she looked at it once again, an unexplainable connection to it there now was; one that she had never felt before.

Toward the fountain she slowly drifted, and to her slight puzzlement, an unexpected flash of blue amidst the yellow aged stones of the fountain’s base was there to meet her eyes when she finally did arrive at the edge of the lifeless structure.

On the verge of wither, its sun-scorched petals began to sway as they came into contact with the falling drops of water, and as those drops grew heavier and more frequent, its slender stem, ever more vigorously, oscillated from side to side, creating a paradoxically lively display of the faded shades of blue and green. Its jubilance was obvious and many long days must it have endured while in want of any nourishment from the silver skies above. With face unchanged, she continued to stare while the once faded beauty of the flower began to be restored before her very eyes.

Subtly and silently, her fingers slowly loosened the firm grip they had on the wavering stem of her source of shelter, and before long, uncoiled themselves totally, in perfect unison of one another, abandoning that which she had defended herself from the elements with up until now.

Floating away on the frivolous currents of the wind, her umbrella took flight almost immediately upon leaving her hands, drifting slightly higher into the air for a short while before cascading down into an earthbound trajectory, where after it reached the ground, pirouetted like a young ballerina with hands outstretched for a few times before finally coming to rest about a yard away.

Without hesitation, the rain enveloped her, dousing her from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. A flurry of splashes erupted from the edges of her smooth, youthful skin, with thousands upon thousands of raindrops greeting her into their presence simultaneously and continuously.

Her palms, held out just a short distance away from her hips, were facing skyward in total surrender, and her neck, arched slightly backward, tilted her visage upward in perfect alignment to meet the rain face to face. And there she stood, in that manner with almost no other movement throughout the course of the entire evening.