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Red Rain and Rain Boots

A Short Story

By Molly R.Published 6 years ago 8 min read
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You told me once that you could never love anyone as much as you loved the sea. I laughed and asked how you could love something that could kill you without a second thought; I asked how you could love something so wild and shameless and unpredictable.

But I get it now.

I did, after all, fall in love with you.

We met on a windy day when the clouds couldn’t decide which way to go. There was a pond outside my house that reflected the sky like mirror-glass, and sometimes I would stand knee-deep in it and imagine I could fly.

Once I looked up and there you were, standing on top of the hill way out in the field as if you had just conquered the world. Your jacket was blowing back like a cape, and I wondered where you’d come from; that field backed right up to the ocean.

I watched as you walked down, stepping lightly over the dandelions that refused to die. The sky got a little darker as you craned your neck to look into the pond and said,

“Look at that. You’re flying.”

I smiled for the first time in weeks, and that was the beginning.

You never really told me where you'd come from; I never asked, mainly because I never believed in letting the past define the future. After you came along I decided that loneliness is only lovely in moderation; I’d forgotten what my own voice sounded like.

It was a little sadder than I’d expected.

We both knew what a heavy heart felt like; you looked at the water like you thought it might drown you and I stood in it because I knew it could.

I never offered to let you stay, but you did. You were still up when I went to sleep and you were awake when I got up in the morning.

More than once I wondered if something had scared your eyes open so wide that they could never close again.

Once I woke up and the sky looked red like autumn; you told me to follow you.

The grass was strange, like it had wilted without turning brown, and the dew reflected the sky, making it seem like it was bleeding.

You had a wild look in your eyes; it was like watching a ghost come back to life.

We walked through the field, stumbling over things we couldn’t quite see in the early-morning light, but you put an arm around my shoulders and hurried me forward.

I had only been out this far once when my father took me to the ocean to teach me how to swim. I’d asked him why he couldn’t teach me in the pond, and he told me I’d encounter much more than a waist-deep pool in my life.

I spent every day after that making sure I never would.

But then you came, a boy much like my father in that nothing you ever did could fit into a pond; you were an ocean, and as we reached the cliffs that dropped down to the salt-and-sugar sand, I watched the waves batter the shore and thought that it wasn’t too late for me just yet.

I had this old fence bordering my front yard, and on days when I felt a little gray, I’d go out and paint it white, if only to convince myself that the color did indeed exist.

The first time I set out to paint since you came along, you followed me out and watched me dip the old paintbrush in the ivory liquid. You asked me why I bothered painting the fence if it would just chip off again. The question surprised me, coming from you, but I told you that even if so many things in my life had gone wrong, the fence was the one wrong I could always make right again.

You helped me to repaint it every time after that, as if you were painting all your gray wrongs white.

One day the clouds started crying and they didn’t stop, and the pond overflowed and drowned the flowers along its bank. I went out in my faded red rain boots and watched the wind shove the rain sideways, like even it was saying, “get out of here!”

You had trudged up the hill that morning, telling me you needed to see the sea, so I tripped my way up to make sure you hadn’t gotten lost in the storm.

I spotted you right away; you were standing with your back to the ocean, staring at a point above my head as I stumbled toward you.

I didn’t notice the blood until I was right in front of you.

It was covering your hands and dripping off your fingertips, creating a splattering of scarlet across your boots.

My vision blurred in the rain, and for a second you looked like the scarecrow my mother had placed at the top of the hill when I was a child. It fell down a few years ago; I burned it where it lay.

Under normal circumstances, I would have turned and run to one of the old neighbor's’ houses where you wouldn't know how to find me.

Now, I checked to make sure you weren't hurt and put a shaking arm around your shoulders. You hadn't blinked since I found you.

We slid down the hill, our clothes getting covered in mud, and I wrestled the front door open and pushed you inside.

The blood had washed away on the way back, but you stared at your hands like they were still coated in it.

I lit the fireplace and we sat side by side, staring at the flames, and I wondered what those reds and oranges thought of us.

I don’t remember when it started, exactly.

One day, a few years ago, we woke up and my mother told me our neighbor had drowned in the bath.

I didn’t go in the pond for a few days after that.

A week later, my father came running up the driveway, yelling about the drugstore owner hanging himself.

He locked our shoelaces up in the safe.

A month after the neighbor drowned, I was out in the field, running in circles, when I noticed a spot of brown amidst the gold and green. It was my schoolteacher, with a gun and a pool of red lying right near her head.

I ran back to the house, screaming indistinguishable things, but my father sprinted right past me with a blanket and a match.

I never ran circles in the field again; not after that.

They went one by one, the people in our town.

My mother went to the cliffs one day, a cross around her neck, and she never came back.

I didn’t have to ask.

My father went to find her, and I spent the next few days wondering if I should go try and bury their bodies somewhere down there, among the seashells and seaweed.

I never did.

I don’t know why it happened. I guess I never will.

The day after the rainstorm, we sat on the living room floor and I told you stories of my childhood.

Your eyes were still a little hollow, and I didn’t ask what happened; I just sat a cup of tea in front of you and watched you listen.

I told you about the time my mother taught me how to sew. I’d made a haphazard dress that didn’t fit quite right, and she made me one that did.

I brought mine out and showed you all the messed up parts, and a breeze of a smile blew across your face.

You listened while I explained that my parents were farmers; they grew wheat in the field where I found my schoolteacher.

I let the crops die after they left.

You softly asked where I got food, and I told you that I had rationed for a while, only eating what I had to. Then I got food from the neighbors or the forest that began at the end of the road.

I asked about your parents, but you said you never had any.

You said you were a wanderer; a collector of places, but never people, and you knew how to make a shelter but not conversation.

Then you told me something I’d been expecting and dreading since you arrived.

You told me you had to leave. But you asked me to go with you.

I looked out the window before I looked at you, getting advice from the trees about being strong. Because I was a stayer.

I stayed and stayed, as if I’d been rooted to the ground, and I guess I’ll always be that way. I knew you were a traveler, a leaver, the moment I saw you standing on that hill; you didn’t look like you’d had your roots torn up.

I also knew that you would go someday because you could never be happy with just a field, a pond, and a girl who liked to paint her fence white because it was the only thing she knew how to fix.

I never expected you to ask me to go with you when you did; I guess I forgot that the waves always steal a little bit of sand from the shore when they retreat.

For the first time in my life, I decided to change; I decided to be spontaneous and I decided to be okay with it.

I decided to go with you.

In the days before we left, I spent a lot of time standing in the pond, or standing in the field, or standing at the edge of the cliffs that had taken my parents away from me.

I felt like I'd been standing my entire life.

I fell in love with you in a torrent, in a downpour, and a part of me was ashamed of it. After all the death and the blood, I hoped I didn't love you simply because you were human.

We did leave, eventually, and I looked once over my shoulder to say goodbye to the cliffs and the pond and the fence. The urge to die stayed behind us, in that field full of red rainwater.

We loved like the sea, strong and unrelenting. Wild but calm, with beautiful days between storms. I swear I'll never love anything more than you. My whirlwind. My ocean.

love
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