The Hungry Mouth of Rain
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The second time she told the story, the rain was knives. The first time, it was only rain. She is about to tell it again; she has just licked her lips and drawn breath. What will it be now? Blood? Pigs? Damn, it’s already changed: now it is feathers, first soft white feathers like a late snow, then goose feathers, brown and gray and black with a mean whir, sharp feathers that cut and pierce and leave scars on the skin.
We lie still in our beds while she tells it, clenching the bedclothes tight around our bodies. We don’t move. We don’t breathe if we can help it. We’re afraid that if we do, something will slip out: blood, urine, cries, moans, feathers. Worse things.
But we are moving, of course, and she can hear us: breathing and gasping and rustling like leaves. We’re turning in the bedclothes as if we could escape, running as we lie there. She lets it go on for a moment, lets us think we’re escaping, that we might get away. Then she smiles in the near-dark and puts a word to it, and we are dragged back, pinned to our beds, pinned by our own bodies and the terror beating its slow deep rhythm in our veins.
It’s the rhythm of a runner’s feet pounding over the long slow hill to our house. I know: I’ve felt that rhythm drumming in my feet as I ran over that same hill toward the old house, where the same story was waiting.
She knows we are lying here. She knows we are listening. She says, “It was a night like this, a rainy night, a night for the dead. I remember, because I couldn’t sleep. I heard the gate bang against the fence, again and again. Bang! Bang! like a hammer in the earth, or a fist on the door. I didn’t like it. I got up. I went to the window. There was nothing, only the wind, and the rain like….” A pause, a breath. She’s changing it again.
This time the rain is black crows dropping out of the sky like stones, their wings folded tight to their bodies, their eyes glittering hard and black as they fall toward us. They hit the ground and break open, with a sound like laughter. Black feathers fly out, sharp-edged, whirling like blades, and where they touch, they cut. Some of them whirl in through the open window where we stand looking out, and cut us. We jerk and cry out in our beds, touching the places where the feathers have cut. She smiles, hearing that, knowing what we feel, or think we feel.
Now it is pigs. This time the rain is pigs. The pigs are falling out of the sky, fat as clouds, blue-black, glistening with rain. They hit the ground with a wet, solid, meaty thump, a sound that makes us sick. Their bodies split open and spill blue guts like sausages into the wet grass. Then their legs kick and they get up and run off into the darkness, toward the woods, their split-open bellies flapping and their loops of guts dragging in the mud. We can hear them far off, screaming. Screams become laughter. And then the bang! bang! again, right there by the house. She says, “I saw him.”
This is the place where I start to remember. Here, at the sound of his footsteps by the house, the solid thump of his feet in the mud of the yard. Now I remember what the yard looks like: it is wide and muddy, and slopes up a long, low hill toward the woods, a sea of tall grass like dead fur, grass that stirs and turns in the wind. And the house stands up out of that sea of grass, all bare wood like skin, with patches of gray paint clinging to it like scabs.
“He was running up from the creek,” she says. “There was a girl running in front of him. I knew she was a girl by the way she ran. The way girls run. She was running fast, but he was catching up to her, slowly, bit by bit. He reached out to grab her. He touched her arm. He had her. Then he didn’t have her: she pulled away and ran faster. I could see how white her arm was where he’d touched it. Then she tripped and fell. I could see her arm reaching out, I could see her hand like a white spider on the ground. I could hear him panting and gasping, like a dog.”
There it is: the dog-panting, the animal-sound of his breath. Now I remember his breath: hot and wet, licking at my ear. His breath is how I knew he was there, even though I couldn’t see him. The room was too dark. I lay in the bed with my eyes wide open, looking for him, but I couldn’t see him. But I could hear him. I could hear his breath. It was the only thing that was alive in that room, in that house, that night.
My sister lay in the bed beside me, but she was dead, or so close to dead that it didn’t matter. Her breath was so light it didn’t count, it wasn’t there. It was drowned out by his breath, by that dog-panting, that hot, wet, insistent rush of air in my ear.
He stood in the doorway, watching us. He didn’t make a sound, except for the panting, and that seemed to grow louder, to fill the room like a living thing. I thought, it is a living thing, it is the dead man’s soul. I could feel it touching me. It touched me all over. I was wet with it, I was drenched in it. I wanted to turn and touch my sister, to wake her up, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make my arms move, they were so heavy, they weighed so much, I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was dying. I thought, I will die now. I felt him move. His breath seemed to get lighter, to rise like a bird in the dark, fluttering against the ceiling. Then it was gone. The doorway was empty. The room was empty. I felt that I was alone there, that there was no one, no thing in the room with me. Then I turned and touched my sister’s cold skin, and knew I was wrong.
She knows we are lying here listening to her, waiting for her to go on. She knows we are scared, and she likes it. She likes us scared. She says, “She screamed when he fell on her. It was a good scream, a loud scream, a scream to wake the dead.” She laughs at that. She laughs, and we all jerk in our beds, our muscles clenching like fists. We don’t want her to laugh. Her laughter is worse than her voice, worse than her story. Her laughter is what she doesn’t say, what she doesn’t need to say.
She stops laughing. We can feel her looking toward us, we can feel her eyes looking us over. But we lie still. We lie so still we can hear the blood beating in our veins. We can hear her when she starts talking again.
She says, “He had her now, he had her good. He was dragging her, like a dog drags a bone. He was pulling her up toward the house, and she was crying now, she was praying. She was saying, ‘Oh God, please, please God, no.’ She was praying to me! I was her god! I was watching her! And I knew then I would help her. I would help her, because I wanted him. I wanted him, because he had touched her.”
I remember. He was touching me, he was running his hands over my body, he was squeezing my flesh, he was pinching me. And I wouldn’t move. I wouldn’t let him know I was awake. I was making my flesh stone. I was willing it dead. I wanted it dead. I didn’t want him to touch it.
She says, “I got my coat. I went downstairs. I went out into the yard. The gate was banging, the gate was banging in the wind. I went to it and held it still. I was watching them, the girl and the man. They didn’t see me. They didn’t know I was there, they didn’t know anything but each other. It was like they were alone in the world. He had her down in the wet grass, and he was pulling at her clothes. She was crying. He was laughing. Then she bit him.”
The word stings, and we jerk in our beds. We can feel it. I can feel it. I remember what it felt like, his body jerking in surprise, his flesh giving under my teeth. I can taste his blood in my mouth. It is hot and salty, a copper taste, a taste like electricity on my tongue. It shocks me, and shocks him. He flinches away from me, then cries out and hits me, a cracking blow to my face, and then I am falling. I am falling into darkness, I am gone.
She is still telling her story, but I can’t hear it. I can only feel it. I am lying in the dark, and something is touching me. I can feel it touching me. It is touching me, but I can’t touch it back. I can’t move, I can’t make a sound. I lie there. I lie there while it touches me. I lie there, waiting for it to be over.
It is over. She has stopped talking, and I am back in my bed, with the others. I can feel them, their heat, their fear. I can feel the silence now that she’s stopped talking. It is a waiting silence. We’re waiting for her to go on.
I know what’s coming. I remember. It was my foot he took hold of. He gripped my ankle in his hand and began to drag me, across the room and toward the door. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t even slow him down. I let him drag me, and my head bumped on the floor and banged against the doorframe, it thumped down the stairs behind him like a sack of wet grain. I could feel the cold rain on my face, the wet grass under my body, and then I felt his hands on me again, pulling at my clothes.
Then I felt another touch. I opened my eyes and saw her standing there, looking down at us. She was smiling, a big open smile that was like a door into the dark. She bent down and touched me again, and I was cold. I was cold, but I could feel her warmth, the heat of her hand coming into me. She was taking my heat away, taking it into herself. And now I couldn’t move, but I could see. I could see the smile on her face, I could see the white spider of her hand on his neck. I could see him look up at her, I could see the smile slide off his face, I could see his skin go slack. I could see her eyes go red. I could see his blood leave him. I could see it in the air between them like a red mist.
She says, “I had him now. I had him good. I was taking his heat, taking his heat and making it mine. I took him until he was nothing. Then I took her, her and her cold skin. She felt good. She felt good between my teeth, sliding down my throat. She felt good in me, with his heat still on her.”
I remember. I remember what it was like to be taken. I remember what it was like to be drained, to be emptied of my heat. To be eaten. I remember that empty place where I used to be, that hole in the air where I had been. And I remember what it was like to come back, to be poured back into myself like hot wax into a mold, to feel myself filling up and hardening into something cold. I remember standing up and walking into the house, with her behind me, her hands on my shoulders and her breath on my neck. I remember what it was like to be hers.
I’m remembering now, but it’s too late. I’m telling you, but it’s too late. She is already in the room, moving slow and sure like a cloud in the darkness. She is moving toward the first bed. She is bending over the first body. We hear the girl gasp, we hear her draw breath for a scream. But there is no scream. There is only silence. There is only the girl’s heat leaving her body, leaving her and becoming part of our mother. We can feel it. It fills the room. It is warmer than blood, it is hotter than fire.
We know we are next. And we know there is nothing we can do. We can’t stop her. We can’t stop her taking us. But we can stop her keeping us. We can stop her having us. We can stop her making us like her. We can do that, and we will. We will stop her. We will let her take us. We will let her take us, and then we will stop her.
This is what it is like to be taken: it is like dying. This is what it is like to come back: it is like being born. This is what it is like to be born: I am drenched in blood, I am covered in it. The air is thick with it. The walls are dripping with it. And I am screaming. I am screaming, and I can hear the others screaming. I can hear her screaming.
She is lying on the floor. She is lying on the floor and we are standing around her. We are standing around her, and she is holding up her red hands. She is looking at us, and we are looking at her. We see what we have done, and she sees it. We see what she has made us, and she sees it. Now our mouths are her mouth, our hunger is her hunger. Now she is our mother and we are her daughters and we are the same.
©2016 Mary Soon Lee◆ About the ending
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