Child and Rain
She sits on the steps with her hands clasped around her knobby knees, the hem of her skirt mid-thigh. She seems too small, dwarfed by the wide stoop, the yawning entrance. She faces the street, expression grave and intent, like a child waiting for her mother who has run late. (She looks like a child still, he thinks, with her thin ungraceful frame, her too-large eyes.)
It won't stop for a while, he tells her.
I know. She peers out into the twilight, past the eaves, until her head and shoulders jut out and darken with rain.
Want to run for it? he asks, hypothetically.
No. She stretches her legs out, points her sandaled feet up.
He notices the water streaming across her skin, soaking her skirt and shoes. You'll catch your death of cold, idiot.
Are you worried, old granny? she teases.
Shut up.
Don't be, she says.
You're full of shit, he counters.
She only smiles. And suddenly, he remembers a street like this and an hour like this with her, years ago. (They sat like this, didn't they? She had smiled like that, hadn't she?)
Come, she orders. She rises easily and leaps down the shallow stairs into the street.
What the hell are you doing? It's pouring out there!
She turns and laughs. (The noise clangs in his ears, unlovely and harsh. He hears her dying.) I know. She skips down the road, splashes through puddles. She races down one end of the road to the other. He watches her, tries to keep up with her flashing arms and legs, her flying skirt.
(She's a child still, he thinks; she runs through the rain, stomps through puddles. But she's not the same. She's not the girl who ran with him that night in the Rukongai.)
She stops and sees him still standing beneath the eaves. She swoops to him, catches his hand in her two small ones, and drags him into the street.
Damn it! Why in hell did you that?
For old time's sake, she answers as she kicks an arc of water into the air.
Shit. You're an idiot, he sputters. He pushes back his hair, now sopping, shakes his heavy sleeves.
Stop complaining! You're having fun, right?
No.
She pauses a moment, stares at him. (Her eyes seem flat and weighted. Too human now, he thinks.) Don't you remember? she asks. When we were kids, we would play in the rain like this.
I know. (But they had been different then. She had been different. She didn't look at him with these eyes, didn't give him this smile.)
Sometimes, she continues, I'd make you stop and look up – like this. She tilts her dark head back, parts her lips. And we'd try to catch as much rain as we could.
Yeah.
She turns to him, smiles. But I'm not thirsty anymore.
Yeah.
She lifts her face and opens her mouth, anyway, wider this time. The rain patters onto her lips, her tongue. She stands still, face unmoving, but the rain doesn't gather, only rolls past her mouth and down her chin. (He knows she will never become full again.)
She licks her lips, once, twice. Then she shuts her mouth, stares at the gray clouds.
It tastes different now, she murmurs to herself. It never tasted like this before.
He sees her tears. I know, he says.
She bows her head. Let's go, okay? It's too cold to be out here long.
I told you, idiot.
She smiles briefly (he doesn't recognize it), before she walks away.