Read Online Monsoon Season by Katie O’Rourke - Free Book Online

her.’
    ‘Scared her how?’
    ‘Well, it’s just . . . I don’t think she’d ever seen me so mad. I don’t think I’d ever been so mad.’
    ‘What were you so mad about?’
    I fidgeted in my seat, leaning back with my legs wide, then sitting forward, more compact. ‘I don’t really know exactly. She pushed my buttons. I just wanted her to shut up, you know?’
    Her forehead crinkled. She tilted her head at me. ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘So, you scared her with your temper?’
    ‘I guess. I mean, it was actually more than that.’
    ‘More?’
    ‘I kind of . . . I slapped her.’
    My mother gasped. The colour drained from her face. Even her lips seemed to turn pale. ‘You
hit
her?’ Her voice was trembling.
    I nodded.
    ‘How . . . how could you have let that happen?’
    ‘I didn’t mean to. It happened so fast. I—’
    She held up her hand and shook her head at me. ‘Stop it.’ She looked like she was going to be sick. She seemed to be ageing decades right in front of me.
    I looked away.
    ‘After what we lived through?’ She shifted in her seat, placing her bare feet flat on the Mexican patio tiles. ‘How?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘It’s my fault,’ she mumbled. She wasn’t looking at me any more. A distance opened up between us and it felt impossible to cross it. ‘I created this.’
    ‘No, it’s—’
    ‘Was this the first time?’
    ‘Yes.’ It was the first time I’d slapped her. I couldn’t bear to confess anything more. I’d got myself off on a technicality.
    ‘Well, she’s smarter than I was,’ she said, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair. She held herself as if she felt chilled and stared at me with narrowed eyes, like I was an intruder.
    ‘Mom.’ I wanted her to remember I was her child. ‘I don’t know what to do. I love her so much.’
    She leaned across the table and forced me to meet her gaze. ‘If you love her, you’ll let her go and never bother her again.’ She got to her feet, picked up my still-full glass of iced tea and returned to the kitchen.
    That night was the first storm of monsoon season. In a matter of days, the fire was out.
RILEY
    The news was reporting rain in Tucson. Monsoon season was about all the weathermen in Arizona had to live for because it was the one time of year when things were not predictable. They stood in front of news cameras with rain beating and shaking their fragile umbrellas, lightning flashing blue in black skies. Trees fell, roads flooded and they would interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to tell you about it.
    During monsoon season, you could run the faucet all day and you’d never get cold water. All afternoon, the moisture hung in the air, grey skies promising the relief of rain but not always delivering on those promises. When it did rain, there’d be a reprieve from the humidity. A few hours of breathable air making it easier to sleep.
    The washes would be filling with water by now: those parched river beds would strain with the unapologetic wetness of it. After months of baking in the sun, waiting for some relief, the earth was never prepared for the rain, couldn’t absorb it fast enough. It would fill the empty river, fill it to the brim, and overflow, flooding the streets, forcing cars off the road, pushing debris, transforming the land.
    Donna said that every year the rain would take some poor Tucsonan by surprise. They’d be walking a dog in the heat of a July evening, trudging through the caked, dusty ground of the empty river bed. Or sleeping beneath a bridge, using a folded-up shirt as a pillow. The water would rush in so quickly that there’d be no hope of escape. She told me someone would drown every year, without fail. It seemed impossible to me, even knowing the weight of monsoon rain. But that was what she said.
    I imagined the way these trapped wanderers would most surely claw at the edge, trying to climb out as the hard earth turned to mud in their hands. Their bodies would be