That night, instead of burning, the first rain in many months and miles poured on the night. The water poured as something above had come undone, a full urn busted and expulsing. It graced the nearby empty creek beds and the dead lawns, the ratty sprats of trampled fields. It pocked the long face of so much dried mud, in which so many other things were buried. It slicked the roofs from which now many had jumped, or dreamt it, or wished they really would.
The rain did not announce itself. It came.
It came through the open skylight window and drummed the father, who hadn’t slept yet but still had dreams: of a warm house he’d envisioned somewhere. He let the water spot his forehead, soak the pillow. He lay blinkless and unmoving while it glossed his cracked lips and tongue. He drank. He drank — and then he sat up, sat on the mattress and thought of words he’d never thought before.
The water found the daughter in her bedroom, inside the swelling house, the old cells bumping, crimping the indenture of the closet where piled neck-deep with old clothes she’d begun to rise off of the floor.
The water filtered through the dead son. It soaked through the warped lid of his casket — through his desiccating skin into his bones and through his dry veins. It filled the soil with mumble as from insects, as the stirrings of the house.
It drenched the mother in her nightgown, through the already flooded gutters in the street. From nowhere and everywhere at once. It washed the soot clean from the mother’s cheeks. It slapped her hair and drenched the ashes. It ran in forked ways down her scratched skin — speaking—that this rain is some beginning — that this rain might never cease.
GRAVEL
The day the sky rained gravel I watched it drum my father’s car. A Corvette he’d spent years rebuilding. He liked to watch his face gleam in the hood. He kissed the key before ignition. He read the owner’s manual aloud. When he lost the strength to stand he left the car uncovered in the street. Each morning I took a Polaroid and we tacked it to his headboard — a panorama of slow ruin. After four years, the car’s wear matched the sallow skin of his sick head. He had me bring the smell of the old leather to him in plastic bags. He’d always said something was coming. He’d always said the world had no idea. Imagine him in bed on that gray day. Imagine him wishing he could drive at 80 through the downpour down to where the tide had begun to expel foam. Where the whales washed up half-rotten, their huge, soft heads brained by the hailing stone. The gravel piled up on the front lawn, covering the pets we’d already buried, one each year. I’d never been good at keeping things alive. On my own headboard I cut notches. The Corvette’s paint came off in yellow divots, my father’s hair loose on the pillow. His teeth were weak. He sucked a bottle. Soon the car’s roof caved. Imagine my father’s baby chipped to bits. Shit falling out of orbit. The scream of others down the street. Imagine the soapy loam covering the beach sand where for years he and I had fried. Where with our skin still raw and itching we’d fit our church clothes over our swimsuits. If I’d listened, in those soft days, I would have taken other pictures to show my children (the children I’ll never have). I’d flip through the photo album backwards and watch my father’s head grow full again — and me smaller, brighter eyed, head shook clean of later days. Imagine the endless pummel of our sore home. The sound of the bigger buildings bowing. How my father insisted I help him to the kitchen so he could see out to the street — where the car sat six feet under, smothered. The stink of the ocean through the glass. Imagine us there together. Imagine the billow of his eye. Imagine the way the hail slowed to let the sun through before it really started coming down.
DAMAGE CLAIM QUESTIONNAIRE
WHERE WERE YOU THAT EVENING?
— My hair was six feet long. I sat wrapped inside it in the kitchen — a gown of deceased cells. Outside the kids from next door beat the house and brayed. Days before, I’d watched their father swan dive from their roof onto the lawn. Their father, the electrician, with the tumor on his cheek. Such grace as he held his hands together and aimed straight for the dirt — he knew already what was coming — he’d sensed the ruining air. Now his boys needed me for feeding; to comb the gnats out of their lashes. But I was so done in already. Even then I lacked most all.
WHAT WAS HUMMING?
— I still taste the songs I gave my baby. You could read his features through my casing. I coughed rheumy refrain between my soft teeth, my voice cragged as my dad’s had through years consuming Red Man and Listerine. He never spat. My eyes bugged with the brush of tongue to palate as I struggled with each note. To sing above the sound of outside. The insects make the most. You think you’d learn to overlook the flutter. The curdle of wallpaper. Ever smash a roach bug with a dictionary? Sometimes you hear them scream. A lady screams much different. I grew up in the South. My headache bred from years of scummy water and inhaled dust. The years of home a house holds aren’t in wood so much as air.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU OWNED YOUR HOME?
— Rick and I ate breakfast every morning for seven years without a blank. He made shrimp and grits with bacon and honey crumpets with black jam. They say O.J. is full of larvae but we drank it in great gulps. Sometimes still I feel them blooming in my throat. Rick would read out loud from the Bible with his mouth full of the grease. He used plastic forks for fear of electrocution. His gold-capped teeth would buzz. At night we slept back to back, kissing vertebrae, interlocked. You couldn’t convince me we’d but spent one life together. You couldn’t say he didn’t love our son, though he left while I was still engorged — a minor heartbeat matching mine; and the drumbeat of my abdomen as our small boy kicked and kicked, in want to puncture his poor mother’s waistline and emerge in time to watch the squall.
LIST THE ESTIMATED VALUE OF DAMAGE
— Twin storm fences, wrecked. Top grade sod, uplifted. The soil turned pink and sponged. Roof puckered, pocked with bird shit. Concrete driveway cracked and scattered. We had a stone angel in the courtyard that’d already lost its arm. I saw that angel fly — lifted off in clean ascension to somewhere we would not see. Swimming pool infested. Lawnmower rusted. Paint on the Chevy hailed obscene. Hardwoods in the den and guest room warped, already rotting. Plumbing pushed up through the floor. Rocking chair run off with. Mildewed carpet. Roach parade. Can we claim instances of soft disease? I’ll show you rickets, nausea, itching. I reckon we can dicker. I’ll sign my name if I can recall the way it went.
HAVE YOU UNDERTAKEN METHODS TO PROTECT AGAINST FURTHER LOSS?
— I often think of pastry. My joints creak when it drizzles. The windows have been painted over. I’d never kiss another man. The baby calm inside me, his kick stilled off to numb. Some evenings I walk the rows of houses and put my face against their glass, peering past the insides where some cold hours after dinner they’d sit around and stare. I found wax flowers in several kitchens and tied them through my hair. My brain is soggy. Mostly I just shed.
CAN YOU STILL SMELL THE NIGHT?
— Many times the sky comes open. The flap of heaven fixed there, fanning. Nothing. I’d sooner prefer sit here in the tub and run the water and watch it spill onto the tile. Thump my belly. Whisper to him. Wait for strumming. Something new. Feel my skin go older quicker, the wet running up my old folds. The smell of mold drawn in the water. Toothpaste dinner. Constant wake. My hair draped on my shoulders wet and shades darker, like a scarf. Sopping and sagging I trundle under, wondering how long it would take to prune my tired face unrecognizable.