Edward Clifford

Rainmaking

Tanis drew water from the well her brother had fallen into and nearly died twelve solstices ago. The boy was playing Kick Rocks with the dog and a roadrunner that had not yet learned the rules of the game, or else wouldn't have led the boy so close to the mouth. It could not have been his fault, Tanis' mother said when the boy had been safely drawn from the well. Those animals will be his death, she said, and the dog was then sent away with the caravan that was departing the following week. Tanis used the excuse to skip homework, but she couldn't have forgotten her brother's nose, how it leaked like a faucet onto the grass.

If he had drowned, then she might have learned to empathize more.

The water tasted of wood, mineralized by the roots of the great oak that guarded the stone mouth. Last us another week, full of hope. It was just the two of us in her house now. Two out of maybe a dozen in the state. Parse the water out. Fend for ourselves against the dehydrating sun. 

She wasn't afraid of the sun like I was. I recoiled desert toad rock-like to avoid the scooping talons of a hawk. Tanis stepped out in the shine, embraced by the warmth that covered her unclothed body. As her skin cooked and incinerated over to blistering red, she reached out to me. Her hand dragged the long fabric of my shirt with holes like cheesecloth and pulled me into the yard.

"Dance with me," Tanis said. "The day was dry, and we must call on the rain."

"I can't dance and you know it," I said, dragging a line in the dirt. "I will not cross. You cannot make me."

"Dance, or I will feed your testicle to a wolf."

She went into the house to put on a Miller record, the pachydermic trombone cascading through the window with caustic bellows. We wound around the house making small dirt devils. Masculine twisters at our ankles. Tanis loved to dance, loved to drag me to my feet without asking permission. She had been in a band, played dive bars and college dorms. Tanis brought it up whenever there was a quiet moment and we both wanted to be able to listen to music through speakers again.

When we finished dancing, we laid back on the porch while the record ended. The sunlight slipped in between her fingers as she wrapped her hand around my throat.

"The brightness of a sun-tit blinds even the most well-adjusted spirit," she said. "Now we sit and break our backs waiting for the rain."

A Place to Call Home

When I was sixteen and a half, I brought a girl I liked into a Pop-Tart box. We were sitting in my truck when she laughed at my proposal. Why not something larger, she said, like a telephone booth? She smiled and let her flip-flops slip off her feet. This was the summer before the man with trimmed hair got on his plane and never touched back down. This was the summer before the earth caught up to the sun. This was the summer before Helene jumped into the passenger seat of a farmhand and moved to Fort Wayne.

Two days later, I bought the box at a 7-Eleven, the last one in the Empire State. Sunil stared at me as I entered. He looked as if he had not moved since the Cold War. I waved at him and strode past cans of tomato soup and porn magazines poorly integrated. Iconography Americana. All of the Pop-tart boxes had been mishandled, corners pinched in like an accordion. One suitable box remained, one week until expiration the only imperfection. Strawberry, and frosted like the painted glass of Helene’s bedroom, letting in the world’s light without the world. At the register, Sunil said there would likely be no more shipments for some time and that I should enjoy them while they last.

I called her house at sunset. Her mother answered, calling me low-yield and yelled over the handset never to come to her house or near her daughter again. Helene picked up her bedroom phone, heard what was being said, declared her mother a petulant cunt, and said she would be over in fifteen.

Helene drove us out to a municipal park, near the pavilion where fraternity brothers would pledge their underwear to Satan, or that is what my brother told me when he went to State. I held the Pop-Tart box in my lap the whole way. Benches consecrated to affluent donors’ ad memoriam hugged the tree line of the greater wood. We sat down and I unclasped the glued-shut lid. The pastries in their mylar sleeping bags gleamed in the lamplight, only to play understudy to the real joy. I removed them and placed them innocently on the armrest. Helene held my hand as I whispered for her to close her eyes until my countdown was over. One-two-three.

We wavered for a moment before opening them. She looked up at the lip a few feet above us, the cardboard walls quivering from the breeze. Will it tip over? she asked. What will happen to us if it does? I kicked the walls to show her their sturdiness. I think we weigh it down enough, I said. This is all a hallucination anyways. She walked from one wall to the other, decompressing in the stable-smelling air. All we could see was the light from the lunar bulb of the street lamp. If we tried, we might have been able to see Arcturus, but Helene was only interested in magic.

I knew she would soon outgrow this experience, my own wondrous Alice bloating up inside a pop-tart box. I never want to leave this place, she said, her wine-red hair swelling like waves across the box floor. Just tell me how to stay down here and I’ll do it. She sat up, waiting for me or someone with authority to instruct. The metallic click of a bicycle chain rose and fell as its rider traveled past the bench. I collapsed next to her. I felt that I should put my hand on her cheek, or touch her big toe with my big toe, or lean my head into her chest, anything to tranquilize the melancholia coating our stomach pits.

We returned to the bench. The box had fallen against one of the arm rails, just as I left it. Helene jolted forward as if to vomit, but she breathed deeply and fell back. A gust of wind cooled us, and I realized I had been sweating. The air was fresher in the open then in the box. Helene took off her class ring and told me to keep it safe. I dropped it into the Pop-Tart box and held down the tab-in-slot, desperate to reseal it. If it held, it would capture everything we felt before we arrived back at her door.

Helene’s mother never called me the day Helene was killed in a home invasion. The newspaper used her yearbook photo for her obituary. As I kneeled at her body at the services, I slid a pair of strawberry Pop-Tarts into her coffin box. Her mother found them near the end, and shouted in between sobs, What kind of joke is this? Why would someone put these next to her beautiful, sleeping body? Helene had instructed me once never answer questions immediately, but to wait until the asker’s anger towards being ignored gives over to despair of not knowing. Then, she had said, you have all the power. I told myself I did not speak up because I wanted to follow Helen’s orders.

 Only when the shelves of the 7-Eleven had been stripped to their plaster skeletons did I realize that you should answer the question eventually.