at the corner

This free-verse is a little long, a little depressing, and turned out more than a little different than I expected it to. Ah well–sometimes poetry shows us what we don’t expect to see, and that’s half the beauty of the thing, I suppose. It wouldn’t be half as much fun otherwise.

-

I find him on the

street corner covered

beneath the awning to

avoid the driving rain

that beats against the grime-smeared

cement of the sidewalk

and pounds against my red umbrella

like a funeral drummer drumming

He leans against the rough brick wall

hands in the pockets of

his gray coat

looking down at the water running

over the pavement

and looking oddly

like himself

or at least the himself

that I remember from

so long ago

Not the same man though

because with him looking down

not seeing me (like he ever did)

he seems hollow

a shell empty

of the emotions I have

so long attached to him

and without those he just

stands gray and still

and utterly strange

Just a man now

a man I haven’t met

and am about to now

Why am I here?

It takes so much effort

trying to start again

when there seems nowhere

left to start

except for this rain-slicked corner

on the grimy sidewalk

where I am about to meet

the man who used to be

my father

I pause on the street

rain drum-drumming on

my red umbrella

and I think about turning back

just turning on my heel and

leaving him behind

to the rain

and the corner and the awning

and all the rest of it

that I worry to approach but

then I see him there

He stands beneath the awning

hands in the pocket of his gray coat

eyes downcast and he looks

sad and lonely

and hollow and not at all like

I remember him

Maybe that’s because

I remember him wrong but

I know that look

all dark and absent and inside the head

like no one can see

I have often seen it in

the mirror

on the days I think of him and me

and little else

I could turn and run

off into the gray rain and

leave him far behind but then

what would that do

except leave me

too?

He looks up at me

Our eyes meet across the

few feet of sidewalk

between us and I see a

bit of something in his eyes

that I relate to

And maybe I see him now

the other memories

washed out by the loud

drum-drumming of the rain

that sends my footsteps

like a forced march

towards him like an invitation

I am not my father

But he is

standing here looking cold

and wet

and miserable

and like the human being

I didn’t remember

but that I can see right here

in front of me

So I walk forward

and let the red umbrella

drop because

what’s left

to hide

now that we seem to

be different

people than the ones

we came to meet?

Hi Dad

It’s been a while

Yeah

Me too

Leaking

From the writing prompt, “The roof was leaking.” This story is set farther along in the Springfield timeline than most of the others.

It had been raining now for seven days straight. Jean Knockings brushed her hair from her face and stood from the dirt floor she’d been sleeping on. She made her way to the door of the hut and looked out at the steaming jungle. The air was so thick with moisture that it felt like a wet cloth pressed against her skin. The smell of wet animal hide radiated from the walls of the hut; it would make her stomach turn if she hadn’t grown used to it months before.

The roof was leaking. The soft drip drip drip of water hitting the ground behind her played an odd counterpoint to the insistent tap tap tap of the rain beating against the sides of the hut. She knew that if she turned to look, she’d be able to see a puddle of water directly in the middle of the packed dirt floor where the rain was leaking through the hole in the alpaca skin at the pinnacle of the roof.

In a weird way, she envied that skin. The idea of being able to gouge a hole and let all the accumulated pressure in her mind pour out was more than a little appealing. After seven days, she knew this place so well that she could literally see it with her eyes closed. With absolutely perfect recall. There were days when Jean truly hated having this ability to remember everything she saw. Sometimes, she thought forgetting would be easier.

No, she admitted to herself, not sometimes. All the time.

Remembering was hard. Especially on days like this one, in weeks like this one, where she had to sit still and just wait for whatever weather crisis or local custom was currently blocking her path to blow through so she could continue on her quest. She snorted softly to herself. Quest was too civilized a word, though one she liked better. Hunt was more appropriate. A hunt for the man who had done so much damage to so many people. The man that had sent her brother to his death and left his body on the floor.

Doctor Aakil Sarin was out there somewhere, and Jean hated sitting still. After six months of being on his tail—six months of near-misses, of dashed hopes, of travel through so many countries that anyone but her would have lost count—she’d finally tracked him down to Sao Paulo in Brazil. In retrospect she should have come here first; in a lot of ways, this place was the genesis of Sarin’s madness. She supposed that in a way, it probably felt like home to him.

She’d been so close this time. Practically close enough to taste the end of her long and so far fruitless chase. She’d even seen Sarin; seen his eyes widen in recognition, seen him flee across the crowded street and into the waiting cart before she could stop him or even speak. She could see the smug smile on his face with crystal clarity when she closed her eyes, even though she’d only spotted it for a fraction of a second before the cart whisked him off towards the mountains.

The mountains where she was now stuck, waiting for the rain to stop so she could continue on her search once again.

Jean still didn’t know what she was going to do when she caught up with Sarin. What was she supposed to do to the man who’d killed her twin, who’d manipulated them both for so long that she couldn’t ever remember a time when he hadn’t had a hand in their lives?

She remembered once, when she and John were five and John had just stolen yet another of her favorite toys, that their mother had taken Jean in her lap and rocked her softly while she cried. “You have to learn how to forgive and forget, Jean.”

Jean remembered her little girl self staring up into her mother’s eyes with bewilderment. “I can’t forget, Momma. I don’t know how.”

Her mother’s expression had been one of understanding; looking back on it now, knowing what kind of man Mr. Knockings had been, Jean wondered just how much of that was empathy, because then she’d said, “Then you’re gonna have to try twice as hard to forgive people, sweetie. Because if you don’t, you’ll get eaten up on the inside. Sometimes, with John, you just have to let things go, like water out of a sieve. How much can you hold before you burst?”

Jean’s brown eyes refocused absently into the present and she blinked quickly to hold back the tears that threatened. She hadn’t cried since she found John’s body on the floor of his office. Not once in six months. “Now what, Momma?” she whispered to no one. “How can I forgive what I can’t forget?”

So many things engraved forever into her mind’s eye: thirty-two years of life with John forever half a step in front of her, underhanded deals she’d been forced time and time again to concede to, a thousand arguments with her brother that she’d never won. And the look on John’s face, that cocky smile that used to hate so much but that she now missed so much it ached. The look he’d had the very last time she’d seen him alive, when he’d walked out the door after she’d told him that she never wanted to see him again.

Famous last words. Ones that she couldn’t ever erase, now that he was dead.

The last living Knockings looked up and watched as a drop of water collected on the torn piece of skin at the apex of the roof, solidified into a drop, and fell into the puddle on the mud floor. Like water out of a sieve.

And all at once, Jean’s impressively brilliant mind finally came to the conclusion that maybe–just maybe–forgiveness wasn’t about forgetting at all. Maybe forgiveness was just letting something leak out to puddle on the floor so you could step over it and move on.

For the first time in six months, Jean let herself feel. And as soon as she did, the tears began to fall.

Drip drip drip.

In the middle of a rainstorm in the jungle of Brazil, in a tiny animal-skin hut with a leaking roof, Jean Knockings cried. She cried and cried until she couldn’t breath, until even she had lost count of the tears, and she mourned her brother. She cried for the way John had died, and for the way he’d lived. She cried for the betrayal of their family by Aakil Sarin…and as she finally began to breathe again, she found herself crying for the doctor himself. Because his life was a dark and bitter one, and he’d never had a family, not like she’d had.

When she finally straightened again, the rain hadn’t lessened. But she took a deep breath of the damp air…and smiled. She knew what she’d do now, when she caught up with Sarin.

She’d forgive him. And maybe, someday, she could forgive her brother, too. Because the bitterness and the heartache had spilled out of her a little, like water out of a sieve. Like the leaking roof above her head. Drip drip drip.

Jean didn’t have to forget. She just had to let it go in little drops until she could leave it behind. Maybe, someday, when the pressure in her head had cleared, she might even be able to forgive herself.

She could wait. With a long sigh, Jean sat back down on the dirt floor and watched the rain leak through the roof.

Rain

Rain (reyn), n:

A soft drumming on window-panes. The roar of impending storm and breaking flood. Sparkling diamonds suspended in air, beautiful in fleeting sun. The gray mist around a lamp post; the smear of neon lights on wet pavement. An intimate, warm touch against the skin late at night. The soothing background noise to a comfortable bed; by turns, the fierce rage of close-by thunder and lightning. The tears of God and angels over the dry and chaotic world. A gray day full of wet umbrellas and too-hot rubber coats. Lonely puddles, strangely melancholy in the aftermath of clouds. The gift of life to dark, thirsty soil. The setting for sad goodbyes and star-crossed kisses. A stifling deluge from the sky. The context of a rainbow. The cleansing of creation’s sorrow; the baptism of the world, re-birthed in soft, damp shades of green and brown and gray.

Acid Rain

Acid rain paints the pale sky with dirty streaks, soot on over-taxed, over-worked, over-bleached air that can barely sustain a human breath.

His fingers scrabble for purchase on pock-marked, acid-stripped metal, find no traction, return bloodied to his side. His lungs heave, desperate for clean air and real oxygen and life-giving breath that no longer exists, not anywhere in the world, and especially not here in this dark corrosive capital of poison machinery.

There’s the clash of metal crashing on metal behind him. It’s a rusted sound, old and tired and mean and relentless, and it haunts his head as it has haunted his dreams for years, ever since they realized that it was too late and that they were going to lose against a never-ending army of beeps and clicks and silver arms and acid fumes.

He looks at the blood on his hands and can’t remember which battle, which fight for his life, for the lives of others it’s from, until he remembers that it’s from the wall in front of him that he can’t climb, that’s being eaten away even as he watches by the acid rain drip-dripping down.

The gloves on his hands are all shredded, exposing bloody tender fingertips to stinging acid that pelts against his bio-suit, tap-tap-tapping against his plastic shell over and over again, trying to leak in, sneak past his defenses, dissolve him from the core.

He can’t run any more. The big boots on his feet are heavy and the suit is stuffy and he’s running out of air, out of life, out of will, out of sanity, all taken away by the gray sky and smoking factories and the rusted sound of metal crashing against metal growing louder all the time behind him.

And so he turns and puts his back against the old dissolving wall that won’t let him climb it and sees the big silver-rust-emotionless-pitiless-ruthless spider wobbling towards him on its eight skinny, barely-there metal legs and thinks that out of all the deaths he would have thought about, dreamed about for the human race, this one is too sad and gray and hopeless to really be right.

But nothing’s right anymore anyway, and the acid rain is running down his visor, in streams so thick that everything is distorted and he can already feel it starting to eat away at the tips of his fingers, the edges of his brain, the borders of his soul, and maybe the acid is really just his loneliness, his deep and dark and desperate aloneness that never ever goes away.

Because he’s the last one, he knows it, feels it in his bones like he hasn’t felt anything else since a long time ago, before they made a race of metal servants that consumed and consumed and obliterated and stripped the sky until all the world was just acid and rust and metal and armies of thoughtless metal soldiers and no men or women or children at all any more, except for him.

And now, the metal spider, a scout, not even a soldier, not even meant to kill before everything became a thing that kills, raises one long rusty leg and prepares to send the electric shock that will stop his heart, cease his blood from pumping, finally turn his brain off like a bad circuit in the big machine of the universe.

He closes his eyes once last time, and he thinks of grass, and flowers, and a blue sky and a soft summer rain that healed the earth instead of destroying it. And he thinks of a sweet voice, and a song floating on a waft of lazy summer air, and a smile, and a feeling deep inside his chest, warm, like love.