Come here.
He was standing outside of the porch, listening to the rain...listening because outside it was pitch black, but somewhere past the evening air was a river of even darker colors growing slowly, slurping at the sides of the riverbanks...he thought he could hear it growing, thought he could hear it slowly filling like a tub in a movie until the water starts to seep over the edges...
He turned to her voice, coming in from the kitchen. There was a single light on, so she was mostly in silhoutte and he likes to think he remembers her smoking a cigarette.
She rarely smoked, and he couldn't remember a prior time. Her mother's radio was a yellow plastic one and she had it on radio station 92.3 The Tide...
Why are you outside? Come out of the rain.
I'm not out in the rain he replied...I'm under the awning...I'm fine.
a bit of silence
I don't want you to get wet...why are you out there?
He stood looking at the darkness....listening to the rain hit the trees, crackle against the car, falling in droves and almost enveloping them in its gray curtain.
I'm listening to the river...I don't want to have it flood.
She took a long draw and blew out a plume of purple-blue smoke....it's flooded plenty of times...one more won't matter. It's all flat down there anyways.
He could smell the slight tobacco...he suddenly did remember when she last smoked, and the taste of her against the backdrop of it...she was perhaps his hidden habit. An addictive element...she may have been his nicotine. He smiled slightly.
Do you remember when we were on the sandbar in the river, that really hot day when it barely moved?
I do, she replied. It had happened a little after her dad had died, and she had been home making arrangements with her mom...he had stolen down there, invading her calamity, but in the end she was comforted. One afternoon he had taken her down to the river at a low ebb and they walked barefoot on the brownish sand...the water tub-warm, the sky filled with pillows of clouds and the beads of sweat on both their foreheads. It was a day of nothing...it was a day of her stacking memories like dishes in her brain, it was the pull of her family and it was his intrusion...old world, new world. It was perhaps cumbersome and yet inviting. He stayed on the periphery.
I always tried to imagine that river filled to almost over-flowing...wondering how much it would take to do that...to almost flood...and it was unfathomable to me that it could happen.
Outside the rain pelted the sides of the house, almost blurring the sound of the music...the wind swept away her ash and her smoke...the kitchen was very small and it was just the two of them.
He walked in, closing the screen behind him. He had a few damp parts on his shirt and his hair was slightly tufted with rain. She took another drag, regarding him slowly, then blew it out in the air above her before stubbing it out in the ashtray.
You're a foreigner here...it's a little disquieting that you're even here.
I know. I'm sorry...I just wanted to see you. It's that plain and pretty simple.
The cigarette burned in a brief orange then settled down to a simple gray smoke...dying in the quiet evening with just the sound of the radio and the rain.
Well...here I am. You're seeing me.
She was pushed back in the chair, arms folded...she smelled of cigarettes and stress...of a tiny daughter and a father no longer in the kitchen...she was remarkably as alive as the growing river outside, continuing its journey around its places to the sea.
If I told you that I'd go stand in the rain, go stand in the shallowest part of that flooding river just enough to keep my head above it, just to see your shape in the rectangle of the doorway for just a moment...that I would welcome that...that I'd gladly let the water overrun me, slap at me before finally swallowing me...just so long that I could see the angle of you, the stance of you before turning away and returning to a home that I do not know...but knowing that you saw me I'd gladly let the waters pull me down.
She looked at him...her eyes never narrowing...never blinking.
I'd say you were a fool.
Outside the rain pelted and swirled...her southern voice was the bit of a reminder that she was back at home and he wasn't...and that she was his river, and he was a bit of the flotsam that floated and bounced along until she neither no longer wanted or no longer needed him.
Until he might slowly float to the bottom.
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