Read Online One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Carellin Brooks
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worked as well as anything else.
57.
A radio outside her building, invisible around the corner, squawks to faraway life. Question and report. A fine rain stipples the outside of the screens.
In the afternoon rain begins in earnest. Soon rain comes billowing out of the sky, a celestial housewife shaking her sheets. What light there was fades to dark but the dark is not complete. Caught in it dancing are these gusts and eddies, the innumerable drops highlighted by street lamps.
Going down the short slope of Thurlow Street on the way to the station to pick up S she sees water running over the pavement. It cascades in serried ranks, a series of broad rounded scales descending in swift and stately fashion towards lower ground. A couple passes her, a lady of a certain age, a man wearing a homburg under his giant black umbrella. The woman smiles as they cross. Figures from another era. These days nobody would walk in such conditions, not unless they had to.
She goes to the station to wait for S âs bus. Itâs an hour late as a rule. All these back and forths, the sheer numbing weight of them. Time. The constancy. How this partial and unspoken connection has become her mainstay, a thin thread connecting their separate cities. Her loverâs shoulders bowed, the legacy of a father absent at the time and since vanished entirely. Slender enough, for the weight of both of their various failures. Marriage being only her most visible, the sign. Neither of them talk to their relations: they exist in peculiar fashion, the issue of springs or tree branches, as in the myths.
The next day it is still raining. She and S walk across the art deco bridge, with its towers in the middle. There are viewing platforms built into the skirts of the towers, there are steps up from the ground beneath as the bridge rises from the side of the hill. As always she measures the distance to the water with her eyes: toy boats beneath, the bay a misty bowl seeded over by rainâs fierce attentions, the pocked surface churned in its depths. How easy it would be, she thinks as ever, to balance there, with the waterâs promise beneath. To vault over or step off. Just do it.
As always she keeps these thoughts to herself.
As pedestrians she and S are soon enough undone. Her hat turned sodden, S âs stained ball cap dripping, their same-sex boots wicking up the splash in mahogany profusion. Their coats heavy on their backs. Where her shoulders stick up into the air she can feel a thin line of wet running across the top of her shirt. Weather getting in.
In the movie theatre theyâre just in time for the feature. They hang their outerwear on adjacent seats with a fine sense of futility. The movie takes place in a misty warm country. The heroine wears a lot of filmy dresses. Her body heavy and delicious, like fruit. How old is the ripe young actress? Twenty-two? She has read the number in a gossip magazine but itâs like so much else, slipped past, submerged.
When they pick their coats up afterwards, shuffle back to the lobby as the credits roll, their suspicions are confirmed. The coats have if anything become wetter, the soak settling in. They walk glumly to the noodle house with its bench seats. Jostling boys at the next table.
My dadâs going to give me the UBC apartment if I go to UBC, she hears one of them say. These are West Side kids, she thinks, thinking also that nobody she knows would utter such a sentence, ever.
Their coats are still heavy. Defeated, they queue for the bus and ride across the bridge. Wet and steamy there, inside, but at least warm. The rain continues. The whole of S âs visit, in fact, it never stops.
58.
Three trips in the wet black, wearing her flower-pot hat as she dashes into cars, into stores. The design on the back of her plain dark coat picked out in reflective tape. The irregular starburst she applied herself lies dully against the black fabric until, catching the light briefly, it flares
57.
A radio outside her building, invisible around the corner, squawks to faraway life. Question and report. A fine rain stipples the outside of the screens.
In the afternoon rain begins in earnest. Soon rain comes billowing out of the sky, a celestial housewife shaking her sheets. What light there was fades to dark but the dark is not complete. Caught in it dancing are these gusts and eddies, the innumerable drops highlighted by street lamps.
Going down the short slope of Thurlow Street on the way to the station to pick up S she sees water running over the pavement. It cascades in serried ranks, a series of broad rounded scales descending in swift and stately fashion towards lower ground. A couple passes her, a lady of a certain age, a man wearing a homburg under his giant black umbrella. The woman smiles as they cross. Figures from another era. These days nobody would walk in such conditions, not unless they had to.
She goes to the station to wait for S âs bus. Itâs an hour late as a rule. All these back and forths, the sheer numbing weight of them. Time. The constancy. How this partial and unspoken connection has become her mainstay, a thin thread connecting their separate cities. Her loverâs shoulders bowed, the legacy of a father absent at the time and since vanished entirely. Slender enough, for the weight of both of their various failures. Marriage being only her most visible, the sign. Neither of them talk to their relations: they exist in peculiar fashion, the issue of springs or tree branches, as in the myths.
The next day it is still raining. She and S walk across the art deco bridge, with its towers in the middle. There are viewing platforms built into the skirts of the towers, there are steps up from the ground beneath as the bridge rises from the side of the hill. As always she measures the distance to the water with her eyes: toy boats beneath, the bay a misty bowl seeded over by rainâs fierce attentions, the pocked surface churned in its depths. How easy it would be, she thinks as ever, to balance there, with the waterâs promise beneath. To vault over or step off. Just do it.
As always she keeps these thoughts to herself.
As pedestrians she and S are soon enough undone. Her hat turned sodden, S âs stained ball cap dripping, their same-sex boots wicking up the splash in mahogany profusion. Their coats heavy on their backs. Where her shoulders stick up into the air she can feel a thin line of wet running across the top of her shirt. Weather getting in.
In the movie theatre theyâre just in time for the feature. They hang their outerwear on adjacent seats with a fine sense of futility. The movie takes place in a misty warm country. The heroine wears a lot of filmy dresses. Her body heavy and delicious, like fruit. How old is the ripe young actress? Twenty-two? She has read the number in a gossip magazine but itâs like so much else, slipped past, submerged.
When they pick their coats up afterwards, shuffle back to the lobby as the credits roll, their suspicions are confirmed. The coats have if anything become wetter, the soak settling in. They walk glumly to the noodle house with its bench seats. Jostling boys at the next table.
My dadâs going to give me the UBC apartment if I go to UBC, she hears one of them say. These are West Side kids, she thinks, thinking also that nobody she knows would utter such a sentence, ever.
Their coats are still heavy. Defeated, they queue for the bus and ride across the bridge. Wet and steamy there, inside, but at least warm. The rain continues. The whole of S âs visit, in fact, it never stops.
58.
Three trips in the wet black, wearing her flower-pot hat as she dashes into cars, into stores. The design on the back of her plain dark coat picked out in reflective tape. The irregular starburst she applied herself lies dully against the black fabric until, catching the light briefly, it flares
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