Gabi Bell-Nunez Rain
It starts off as a soft drizzle, patting the frames of wooden bells. This drizzle, small and weak, dribbles from bells and hits concrete. Water saturates the concrete, wood, and soil, making its way into everything. I peer to the translucent sky and, for a second, every droplet freezes, suspended in air before they abruptly meet surface. To explode into extinction. To become an insignificant glaze of a tree leaf, or the deep rich brown hues of damp bark on an oak tree. Clearly unseen at the glance of an eye. Yet a droplet doesn’t merely vanish. It disperses into a trillion little bits that melt into trees and wood and concrete—amalgamating as one. Everywhere I look I find this to be true. The trembling rain taps against my door, searching for companionship. Rain beckons for me to come outside. I stay in. From the cracks and crevices, rain seeps in, peeping my name. A steady stream of water falls in a glass on the kitchen table, filling past the brim, flowing out onto the tables grooves and cracks, forming a pool where soggy bread and napkins flow off the tables edges— a thud against the floor. Books furl and wrinkle at its sides as drops fall, seeping in between aged words. The letters, the ones from years ago, kept in a wooden chest locked away from the world, wither with each drop that seeps in through the wood. The letters drench and their ink fuse into one, now a mesh of darkness on white trifold pages. Rain is half of my house. Rain—now falling with greater force—splashes through the paved roads. No longer a gentle visitor but an intruder in my safe haven. Gushing through the windows and doors, rain floods everything I ever considered home, drowning my village of belongings in its own iced sorrows. Boundless tidal waves of cerulean swoosh into swirling whirl pools of great strength, slurping away anything in sight. Hysteria floods through the village of objects, now frantically swimming in this distraught thunderstorm. Brooms and clocks and letters and doors struggle and drown in this brawl, falling in and out of consciousness. This coursing river flings them around, pushing them down then up with the jumping waves. Then suddenly the storm stops, leaving objects to float in a sea of murky grey. The roads are a bowl of unintentional garden salad, scattered with bits of screws and bolts from the mechanic’s shop, doors from the villagers’ houses, produce from the market place, laced garments from the tailor’s shop, and small, lemony
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