And the Raindrops - Its Tears
by Sean EadsLong before her blindness, his mother, like all mothers, preached of the safety beneath umbrellas. Now the way she insisted on hers, though she could not see, reaching for it before a cane or his own hand, terrified him. In losing her sight she seemed to see the Demon more, like it was on the ceiling of their living room. He would watch her on the couch sitting with closed eyes and keeping as quiet and as still as water, her thumb on the button of the rolled umbrella. She saw the Demon once as a child, daring it the way some children do when they escape their parents. Sixty-five years later she was cursed by a remembrance that was implacable enough to light her dead eyes. He knew this because she had broken down on the couch and told him everything, or almost everything. Her story had gaps. She was not reminded of the Demon, but it was reminded of her; it remembered her and came to torture her. The Demon lived inside her as it lived inside everyone who ever looked at it, and so it would not pass from the sky until all who ever glimpsed it were dead.
"You must always carry your umbrella," she said, "just as the patriarch taught you in school. You must never look at the sky or you will be Demonsighted and become like me."
Sometimes he wondered if listening to his mother's story was another way of becoming Demonsighted. Was hearing about the Demon the same as seeing it? The village philosophers had not answered that question (the asking of it alone was blasphemous).
"I spent a month in the care of the priests. They thought my soul was lost. They managed to purge its face from my memory through scripture. For decades I didn't think about it. Your grandmother was dead; otherwise she would have stopped me from doing what I did. When you love someone you teach them not to do things that harm you, as I taught you."
"Mother, what - what did it look like? Did it truly look like a face? Did it have features, a wrinkled brow, ears, a nose - "
Her limp hand caught his wrist. She must have felt him leave the chair and come closer as she talked; the creaking of the floor, the shifting weight on the couch, the new closeness of his voice between one question and the next revealed him. He had thought "caught his wrist," but that was absurd, as there was no strength in the sparrow fingers perched and spread atop the big bone of his arm.
"You have not looked," she said, and waited. He realized she wanted him to say no.
"No."
"And you never must."
Age had stolen her memory. She knew he'd looked once. His own memory carried him back to a when he was eight. They went walking in the village, and the wind was particularly strong that day. It tested and tried every umbrella. Mother and father were sharing the large one, trusting him to his own. How brave and important he had felt under his own canopy. Maybe pride had relaxed his grip. His fingers opened a little. The baiting wind seized its chance to launch his umbrella inside out. Panic. He stumbled once and his gaze lifted.
(O Demon)
Strangers came to help, but their closeness sounded distant. Their voices came like the soft collision of umbrellas in the narrow marketplace. Men hunched over him, blocking as much of the sky as they could until his mother's hand descended over his eyes, and he heard all at once the explosive lament of his childhood's end.
He had never forgotten the horror of being Demonsighted, but the priests purged the actual image in time to save his sanity.
"Mother, I am going to go and pray."
"You are a good man, a fine man. I will stay here."
He started to leave.
"Take my umbrella with you. I hear the wind outside. My umbrella is strong and will not break."
He took her umbrella in a careful grip. It felt too much like holding her delicate body, though it was sturdy with a handle like polished bone and opened to a four foot circumference. When it was closed and rolled, like now, it proved a fine walking stick. He unclasped it and teased the fabric loose to help her.
"The wind is not too bad. I will take my own umbrella."
She agitated a little. He placed hers back beside her, and despite whatever fear she felt for her son, her hand latched to it at once and she was silent.
He went to the door, barely stopping at the soft whoosh of nylon in the living room behind him. He heard it every morning as he left for work. His mother always said it was safer under the umbrella.
Inside the prayer house he stopped at the chapel entrance where a sign announced umbrellas would be blessed tomorrow. He moved past the sign and observed the quiet rows. The call to silence had already been made and the service was not far from starting. He should enter now rather than disrupt the patriarch's sermon, but he preferred the cover of words. Will I confess today? He wondered. Did the priests and patriarchs know he'd never confessed? Did they all keep lists and consult each other at midnight? Some said the Demon would disappear once every person in the world capable of confession did so. Was the world's torment because he alone avoided confession? Surely there were others like him who had never confessed at all, or confessed to one thing but not another, or who simply lied.
He saw three people he knew well, but his thoughts gravitated toward a fourth, a man he'd not spoken with in two years. An inexplicable urge to talk to him launched him into the chapel. Already the frocked priests entered ahead of the patriarch, coming into the pulpit from two side entrances. A buzz was building that made the silence tense with expectation rather than meditation. Suddenly even he felt that today would bring their liberation if he confessed. He felt his awkward, troubled walk. With such a burdened gait, did his confession need words? There were paragraphs of guilt in his body language but was there forgiveness in anyone's understanding nod?
The man's name was either Bartrae or Bertrue. His foggy memory did not clear as he hastened forward. In a few more steps he realized there were no empty seats near his target - indeed, no space anywhere. He stood in the aisle, the unwanted center of attention, the only unseated person in the audience. People stared at him, and he yearned to open his umbrella against their stares. He wanted it more than anything but could not commit that unimaginable act of blasphemy. The chapel ceiling was umbrella enough. Except it wasn't - his mother knew that - and right then he knew what he would confess and what he wanted to tell Bertrue or Bartrae if he could sit beside him.
Two rows down a woman with a pitying smile made room for him. He sidled into the spot just as everyone rose to honor the patriarch. He stood rigid, bending only a bit to glance at Bartrae or Bertrue, who looked straight ahead. He frowned. He had been certain the man would be glancing back.
He wondered suddenly why he bothered living the lie he told his mother. Praying was usually just his excuse to go drinking, which he did with increasing frequency. He worried about becoming a Blind Looker, those fools who drank until they were found on the street or on a hillside, laying on their backs with liquor and choked words dribbling from their mouths as they died slowly, too drunk to look away even after the first sobering jolt of Eyes meeting their eyes. It was not uncommon to find a Blind Looker dead in the morning, as empty as the bottles around him. Those who kept their sanity intact were thankful they drank enough to black out before their Demonsight consumed them.
He was not a Blind Looker.
The man was staring at him.
The stare broke the moment he noticed. Both men's attention returned to the front and the priest behind the patriarch. The windowless chapel had darkened somehow and he knew the Demon's shadow was overhead. The lit candles scattered throughout the chapel suddenly seem to labor against the dark. It was not unlike being in the tavern in the afternoon when the Demon's shadow fooled the streetlamps to light and woke owls with a promise of early supper. That's when it was most dangerous to find a full cup in front of you and another already swallowed, because you felt comfortable and a little brave when you had reasons for neither. That's when you knew to stop drinking, and that's when you drank anyway, and stared into the cup with your lifelong questions and knew the answer was right overhead if you only risked a look.
The patriarch said, "Science was defeated, but we are not defeated. Are all the old Gods ended? They are ended. But we endure."
The patriarch's words surprised him, so defiant in nature, so surrendering in tone. Were the old Gods ended? How could anyone know?
The patriarch continued.
"When the Boy climbed to the mountaintop in a rage too large for any except little boys - when the Boy stopped exhausted, falling first onto his knees and then onto his back - laying looking up at the sky and clouds, the drifting clouds - when that moment that should have brought peace was thwarted by the undying rage-how the rage went out from him and into the sky."
The patriarch was struggling, which struck him as being immensely odd. He glanced over to see if Bartrae or Bertrue looked like he thought so, too. His childhood had been a string of days hearing the Creation story told over and over. He could recite all the details by rote but for all that familiarity he could not speak the Creation tale himself. Only patriarchs and priests forged narrative and substance and meaning. The priestly quality lay in storytelling, not study, and he had never heard the Demon's story told like this before, sluggish and struggling for air, fragmented. The Boy's ascent to the mountaintop had always been fluid, like climbing steps. Now the Boy scrambled over boulders and harrowed crags that everyone knew did not exist.
"The rage had an image. A Father's face, hateful in the Boy's mind. The clouds took it up. The clouds gathered into shape! We know the shape! Two Eyes and a Mouth."
At this point the audience gave the accustomed cry of anguish.
"We know there was a time when our heaven was unfettered and the youthful gaze drifted upward to the natural canvass of the clouds. Long ago, my children, in the days of old gods."
He noticed a man at least as old as the patriarch crying particularly hard, as if he remembered such a time. His mother used to talk of when lovers on the grass sought shapes in clouds, but even that was a tale from her own grandparents. The black umbrellas were their sky now, and that midnight fabric allowed no sketching.
"Yes, he saw the clouds form, saw the Face, saw the Face clearly, and - and it was there, looking at him, a great Mask stretched across the sky!"
"And the Boy ran," he whispered to himself as the patriarch's long pause became unbearable. This part of the story always excited him the most, especially the way his mother told it, fearful and dangerous. He remembered imagining a boy much like himself flying madly down the mountainside, a wild careen that just escaped stumbles, slides and broken bones, an avalanche of heaven behind him.
The patriarch's voice sank to a crawling slur as it tried to describe what could not be described; the coming of the Demon's reign. The Demon took dominion in the sky and broke the former world in an hour. Science offered fruitless guesses, and when its roots died all the forests of technologies withered with it. There used to be things called airplanes, and men soared in the sky where the old gods never were. But no one could fly above the Demon that judged them, for all the world's wickedness had drifted up and gathered into the sinister face that was just one cloud and yet existed everywhere, city-crumbling and person-slaying.
"Excuse me."
He looked over and found the man had stood to leave. He exited the row and moved up the aisle, and as he passed the man bent a little. "Excuse me." He took this to mean follow quick. He did moments later.
He called to him but the man did not stop. Had he misunderstood? Outside the chapel was an ornate ten-foot canopy where parishioners opened or closed their umbrellas. His had somehow jammed. "Wait!" he called again. He looked to judge the distance between them, and what he saw made him drop the umbrella. The man didn't have one. He had just reached into his jacket pocket for a black-billed cap and walked into the open.
He could only stare. How odd he seemed among the villagers hurrying back and forth, their own umbrellas glistening black in the freezing sunlight of the demon's left eye. He seemed lost - a madman, a fool, a suicide. He seemed dangerous.
"Please," he called again, working the umbrella. His mother was right, her own was much better, more faithful, unfailing. He tried it again and again, his attention torn between the problem and the increasing distance. The man was already hard to spot amid a hundred canopies bobbing back and forth. He knew if he had any chance, he would have to be more outrageous than even the man he chased. He stepped from the canopy holding the jammed umbrella, saw his right foot in the sunlight, sweated, swallowed, and went forward.
He moved forward, chin to chest. His legs shook. He tucked the umbrella under his arm and cupped both hands at the top of his forehead to make his own bill. He moved with more confidence, saying, "Excuse me, excuse me" to the people blind under their umbrellas. Rude remarks everywhere; desperation and sorrow everywhere; hatred and then, in the middle of it all, his name, heard clearly to his right. He stopped and turned. By a building just a few yards removed from the traffic Bartrae or Bertrue waited.
"Please, I want to talk to you if you'll just give me a second." But he could not talk like this, hands cupped over his eyes. He tried another hard jerk on the umbrella.
When the canopy exploded open a moment later he scampered under it and just breathed. With a weary, relaxed smile he adjusted his hold on the shaft. His man's gaze stayed level and assured under the bill of his cap, but now the lack of an umbrella did not make him look dangerous, only naked, and he almost laughed.
"You were looking at me in the chapel."
"Because you were looking at me."
He nodded. Being unsure of the man's name made him hesitant, more so since Bartrae or Bertrue knew his. It was silly not to ask, not to confess that he had forgotten.
"We've spoken before. I forget exactly when. A long time ago."
"At chapel?"
"I don't think so," he said. He added with some guilt, "I rarely go."
"It would have been easier to say at chapel," his man answered. "I would have known you were lying. This is the first I have attended in three years."
The admission made him scope around under his umbrella like there might be eavesdroppers overhearing a criminal confession.
"I like to hear the Creation story."
The man sneered. "We go to pray for the Demon's destruction and all we do is hear of its birth."
He was surprised to hear anyone say such a thing without an umbrella to muffle the words. On the ground the sky darkened, but not enough to mean the Demon was moving. The sky above the Demon's eye must have been cloudy and overcast, pregnant and dark, though never as dark as the Demon itself. Soon it would rain.
At last the man said, "Do you believe what the philosophers say, that it came from ourselves collectively? That it is our Demon, our Judge, because we are our demon, our judge? Or do you believe the priests?"
He considered the question. He did not know the entirety of the philosopher's argument, except that it conflicted with the priestly story. He was not prepared to oppose the priests. "No," he answered, "the Demon came from the Boy, and the Boy is literal not figurative."
"I wish to see the Demon," the man said.
"You need only look up."
The man smiled. "There are other ways."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a glittering square glass that fit the length of his palm. A hand mirror.
"There was a very old god who could only be looked at safely in reflection. Perhaps it was the Demon all along. We stand in its eye. It is above us. If I were to extend my hand and angle this up . . ." The man started to do so, his gaze fixed upon the reflection.
Beneath his umbrella he watched the mirror's pivot. A little box of light glanced off of Bartrae or Bertrue's clothes and ran up his torso toward the eyes. The mirror began to shake violently as it angled on the man's mouth. It moved over his lips and stayed there.
He was startled by a soft pellet sound above him followed by another slightly more pronounced. Yes, it was raining slow, heavy drops, the kind that fall hard and feel and sound like hail. His man pocketed the mirror and extended both arms. His flesh became wet.
"And the Demon looked down upon the world in judgment and slew them with madness that looked back; the Boy's parents it slew; the Boy's brothers and sisters it slew; the Boy's false god it slew; and the blood did not content it, the Demon of our despair. And the thunder came, the proof of its fury, and the raindrops - its tears."
He shivered. "You should be a priest!"
Bartrae or Bertrue's eyes narrowed under the bill.
"I meant no offense. It is only the way you rendered - "
"I am quite the storyteller. Maybe I should be a priest. Even a patriarch."
The man stood a moment in the increasing rain, and then turned.
"No, please don't go!"
"I am getting wet."
He looked at his hand wrapped around the handle. With an explosive frenzy his gaze climbed up the shaft to the black protection flowering above him. And beyond that - beyond that - beyond that was a wave of nausea and terrible dread, a certainty that he could not do what he wanted to do. Yet Bartrae or Bertrue's passionate rendering still rang in him, igniting a reverence older than his fear. Perhaps he had not come to confess; perhaps he had come seeking lost faith, seeking the story renewed inside him. Could he not repay with sacrifice?
He extended his arm an inch. He retracted it. He fought and surrendered and fought again. His holy man was becoming intolerably wet.
"Please - sir - my umbrella."
Their hands lingered, touching each other on the handle that was now arm's length between them, sheltering neither.
One hand crawled over the other and held it tight.
"I must get home. My mother. She's very ill."
One hand left the other and returned holding the cap. They realized their own position in each other and stood facing off, he with the umbrella outstretched, the other with the cap, both suddenly unprotected and thinking, A single glance up, a second's temptation and we are Demonsighted. He could not say how the man felt, but for himself all his insides became a deep pool of drowned sins, once stagnant and still, now churned madly by a spear breaching his skull from the sky.
The Demon saw.
For a moment it seemed the man would dare the open sky. Instead his voice came again, trembling and small, surrendering, "Take my hat. Give me your umbrella - quick!"
They finished their exchange. The cap would not accommodate his larger head and the bill was too short. He could see clouds to the immediate north if he held his head straight. The Demon was moving west, of course. He must find a way home that kept the west always at his back. Bartrae or Bertrue shivered beneath the umbrella.
"I hate the security this brings me."
"Why?"
"If we all looked up at once, if we all just cast down our protection at the same time and gave the Demon our stare, it would leave. If the priests are right and one boy's imagination created it, then the imaginations of millions would destroy it. What's needed is one person to look up at the right time. The right person in the middle of the right crowd."
"Is that person you?"
The man looked down at all the mud.
"One day."
"Why not today?"
"I cannot. Not yet."
"Perhaps it will be me."
Bartrae or Bertrue laughed and said, "If not me - no one."
He wondered if he had been insulted. Then he considered the look in the man's eyes. He was right. If not him, no one.
"I am going now. I will see the umbrella returned to you."
"But wait, I have so much to say - "
"You may keep the hat," he finished, and walked away.
He waited in the square with most of his village for the start of Execution Day, which was the fourth of every month. He'd missed the last few because of his mother's health but now her gradual decline meant she slept long stretches in the living room beneath her umbrella. Her internal clock was slowing, its alarm bells muting. Thinking of her as a watch unwinding after a lifetime of hours comforted him.
Flanking the square and its terrible pillories was a wall of black umbrellas overlapping like reptilian scales as the village jostled for position. In the middle of crowd the idea of an overhead sky might seem impossible but he was not in the middle and beneath his own new umbrella he saw a dangerous edge of blue. That he saw any sky meant the umbrella was too small for him and he fretted over his careless choice.
The Demon was looking east now but turning on them. Until its shadow fell, the square enjoyed strong but pleasant sunlight that gave the umbrellas a wet gleam. The shadows of the people lay on the ground in pure black contrast, forms that were long and perfect from the feet up until the umbrellas made a disfiguring hump on every back.
The Demon came on quick, erasing the shadows beneath them with its own encroaching darkness. Ten guards entered the square led by a priest who walked under a red umbrella. The guards each had an open umbrella in their right hand and a closed one latched to their belts like a club. Their left hands held to a chain of five criminals who walked bowed and unshielded with their eyes squeezed shut. They seemed docile, their resistance biding. The guards unchained them, brought each to a pillory and made them kneel. Their arms were stretched out and locked into place. None of them fought but one began to snort with rapid pants when the strap came around his neck. The strap kept each criminal's chin planted into a crude divot that forced their heads nearly straight back. From his position he could see only two of the five damned men. Both had their eyes clamped tight, muscles twitching in their cheeks as they summoned strength from the far reaches of their bodies and gathered it in their faces. Their last stands would be made at the eyelids.
The Demon now covered the entire square with a shadow that flowed rather than fell, like some dark blood rising from wounded earth. The blackness was sharp like the gaze of a doctor determined to find disease in all flesh. The villagers clutched their umbrellas and the priest seemed most discomfited. He wondered about the priest, who seemed so young. Could such a youthful man tell the demon's story well? He thought of Bartrae or Bertrue, who he had not seen since their exchange two weeks ago. How many others in the village could also tell the story better than the priests?
The shadow moved and gave way to sunlight as the Demon shifted to hold them in its right eye. The sunlight was different now, stripped of heat, a frigid lance. He looked down at his feet as he began to shiver like everyone else. The Demon's shadow on the ground is the mask of its face, he told himself, projected down by the sun behind it. But what was the face? What did it look like? He could not begin to imagine nor did he want to. Except he did want to. What face was it that made the shadow on the ground even when there was no sun, even in the blackest night of a new moon when somehow its eyes poured down a baleful, blanching sort of gray, like light in a distant window opened to winter's overcast. The Demon moved and the wind carried its voice in a language they were thankfully dumb to, Now the noon sun stood directly behind the Demon's right eye and the square blistered with a shadow-creating, shadow-annihilating light and from beneath the umbrellas and up from the pillories rose the village's sudden white vapor breath.
His umbrella was heavy with the Demon's gaze drilling into the black canopy. The priest called for confession and some in the crowd shouted out this sin or that. The criminals did not speak. He sighed a little and held his umbrella with both hands. Did the priests not understand the nature of men at all, or did they understand too well? If the criminals facing Demondeath would not confess, then why should anyone?
Beneath his umbrella he thought, Get on with it. The priest, perhaps from inexperience or perhaps from cruelty, was stretching the executions past an hour. He could never wait so long. His mother might wake and call for him. He backed away, hoisting his umbrella higher until he escaped the crowd.
Behind him the square hushed all at once and then a grotesque howl sounded. He pivoted and found he could actually see better further away than near. Two guards stood behind each prisoner. At the priest's nod, one guard pried the first prisoner's right eyelid up while the second forced open the left. The prisoner's head jerked and twisted in hard constraint. The guards bore down like they! e d gouge out the eyes and the prisoner's bound body convulsed enough to rattle the heavy stockade. He screamed as his eyes were opened. The scream lasted the fullness of the lungs and petered into a rattle like phlegm in the throat. One by one the executions went, and by the time the last man's vision was forced the first man had become stiff with paralysis. The guards no longer bothered to assure his gaze. It was frozen on the Demon above. Down the row all the prisoners resembled men bit by some poisonous snake whose venom leaves the victim alive, but locked in every joint. Were they already insane? He thought of their minds decaying fast inside their heads, food for the Demon. He looked to the ground. Sacrifices. The priests and patriarchs did not call it that. No one he knew did. It didn't have to be said.
"What is the Demon?"
The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud.
"What is its nature?"
Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.
"Where is the hand of man in the Demon's reign?"
He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.
He returned the collection of pages to his mother's limp hand and did not understand if she meant for him to see it or not. He understood little of the text except that it must have been a transitional attempt to answer the Demon's existence from the scripture of some old God. The browning, brittle pages had annotations in a handwriting he recognized as his grandmother's. This scandalized him. Stained and bound only with brass clasps, composed half in typescript and half in pen, the documents were a blasphemous relic. Had his grandmother really entertained such notions?
They must be meant for me, he thought. How could she be reading them?
He looked at his mother slumped under the umbrella and asked, "What is the Demon?"
She could not answer him now. He realized it even as his hands, with their own agenda, moved the umbrella to a more natural position along her arm.
Many in the village came to his mother's funeral, and this did not surprise him despite their last year of isolation and loneliness. Weekend funerals were always well-attended social gatherings. Because she had lived her entire life in the village, a patriarch rather than a priest presided over the ceremony, which ended with the commitment of flame. He tensed as the torch descended. There was none of the odor he feared. He had to admit the burning had a pleasing way, his mother's body and clothes having been prepared with scents and spices. But after the smoke and heat lines he saw the first ashes, and vomit filled his mouth all at once. The Demon moved over them, first freezing them in its right eye; then the right eye moved away and a long, long stretch of darkness followed before the ground lit up again and the wind itself became flame. Demonsbreath. His umbrella - he carried his mother's now - felt like a little matchstick that would snap in a moment. The Demon's mouth, he thought, lifting the umbrella just a bit to see the ashes fly. We are in the Demon's mouth and my mother's ashes are rising to be swallowed.
His left hand reached up along the shaft to the lock. His fingers found it, paused once, moved and paused again. A little pressure there - the ease of it terrifying - and the canopy arms wilted and collapsed. He looked down as the heat became fierce on his neck. On the ground the umbrella's black silhouette shrank frighteningly small over his head and diminished to a narrow, fruitless twig on the broad trunk of his body. He watched the course of the umbrella close and drop as if it was not something his hand controlled.
He touched his hair. It had never felt so dry and so hot, as combustible as straw. In just a few unsheltered moments his thirst became awful, as if he had wandered hours in a desert. But how his eyes drank! He alone could see everything-his mother on fire, the smoke and ash, everyone's black umbrellas overlapping each other like the plate armor of some midnight lizard. Guarded as they were they could not see him standing there unguarded. He might stand among them for hours and never be noticed. The patriarch's head bent under a red umbrella a priest held for him. Beneath the black umbrellas everyone mimicked him. He could not see them but he felt the old posture of worship in his bones and sinews.
I can look up, he thought. He had been thinking about it all his life, waiting until he did not care to live another minute - or rather for just another minute, a minute of the Demon's face, a minute to see it, know it and chart its course. He knew its shadow, knew the oval darkness with its pitiless square eyes and square mouth. But the face itself - was it black or white, cloud-textured or smooth like a glass object floating in the air? How high above them was it? Did it rise sometimes to consume the mountaintops? Did it also stare at the stars above and far beyond it, judging galaxies with the same gloating smile it showed this world? In the next moment he did it. He counted sixty seconds and then looked. He counted backwards from sixty with a full comprehension he would be dead or insane and worse than dead, a walking corpse soon after. I will look up, he thought. I am going to do this. Seventeen, sixteen. I will know at last, I will see, I will not die like all these others with rumors and a priest's reckoning in my ears. Nine, eight.
There is only - there is only - there is only -
Five, four. A countdown to cowardice or courage. He scowled once and followed his mother's ashes fully.
He did not shriek when he saw its eyes, so familiar and red. They heard him collapse, of course, and the village considered him lucky to have gone unconscious without his umbrella, sparing him an accidental glance at the Demon's face. A son's overwhelming grief they said, not knowing. For ahead of him, coming on fast and unseen, had been Bartrae or Bertrue to intercede. And just as he looked up that man went to his pocket and brought out the small hand mirror which, lunging, he managed to impose between his eyes and the Demon. The eyes he saw were streaked and horrible to behold, human and inhuman all at once. He collapsed, and Bartrae or Bertrue's strong arms settled him to the ground before pocketing the mirror, as the patriarch and the rest came to encircle them. For the rest of his life he would have no memory of his mother's funeral, and always shave and brush his teeth staring straight into the drain. Sometimes he would add tears to the spit and the lather spiraling away beneath him, and then go out under his umbrella to wonder about the rain.
©Sean Eads
Sean Eads is a librarian with the Jefferson County Public Library system in Colorado, and a freelance writer.