RainGods

Rain gods

by mario paolo domingo macariola

On the sky was a great heap of black clouds that it almost seemed like the clouds were the sky itself and the blue peeping from tiny holes in it were just unwelcome yet tolerated visitors. it was raining so hard that it was as if the rain were falling by the buckets and I could not help but notice how the pavement appears blurred by the continuous beating of fingerlike droplets or how the puddles resemble a certain shape one moment only to change suddenly at the next. As if this kingdom of July was malleable and was somehow stuck at midshift. At one point, though I don't know for what reason, I even imagined that there was an old guy with a crooked nose and thinning white hair sitting on one of those great patches of darkness hastily pouring buckets into the earth without much thought that the supposedly heat wave-stricken weekend turned into this, also i didn't have any idea that it would be raining because of the weather bureau’s announcement the day before, and hence i was what you could call "stranded" inside the bakeshop; holding a paper bag with a loaf of French bread in it. 

It was bad enough that bread easily gets soggy, but to make matters worse, it had to be jammed inside a paper bag that unlike the trees from where it came from, isn’t really what you could call 'water resistant'. whoever decided that bread should be put inside paper bags must have decided it on impulse and never even bothered to think about times like these. I had been inside the bakeshop for about an hour, standing by the huge glass display window, staring at the water-filled streets and my house across it. I know that I could have ran the ten meters to my door if I wanted to, but it was the best loaf I’ve ever seen in the past few weeks and i just had to take it home without making a mess of it. I turned my head and saw that there were a few customers too, and like me, they also didn’t have umbrellas or rainwear with them. There were exactly five of us there, two of them were talking in loud voices about their families, one was cursing the rain, while the woman behind the counter just stood there, hands on the apron of her white dress as if not really minding the rain at all.

As a regular in this bakeshop, I almost never saw her lose that careful smile of hers. Not even during the time when a stray baseball broke through the display window and glass shards scattered like dust on the sidewalk, it was hard not to imagine that her face was incapable of other expressions, in fact, it was harder to imagine her face with another. She was one of my childhood friends, although at the moment, the only recollection I have with her was eating at her house once for an occasion I can’t even recall. Most of the time, I can’t even remember her name. it was like an itch that was scratching some part of my body that even I can’t place.

The two other customer’s loud voices became hushed and I noticed that the other one stopped cursing all in all; an eerie silence fell over the bakeshop. Again, the thought of an old man came over me: his sun-baked hands firmly tilting the bucket as if teasing the water inside it to come out and spill over the world below, his thick grayish-white eyebrows creased in an expression that was somewhere between thought and anger. Again, I have no idea, there wasn’t any old man like that I knew to have a picture like that come over me so vividly, it was as if the thought was something a magician pulled out from a hat.

‘It’s the old man from my dream last night’     I heard the woman behind the counter mumble, or I heard it and assumed that it was her, considering that she was the only woman there.

The other customers didn’t show any sign that they heard anything.

‘Excuse me’    I said to her, there was a trace of surprise in my voice.

‘Yes?’ she replied.

‘Did you say anything about an old man and a dream?’ I asked.

She paused for a while and flickered her tongue over her lips as she gave off an expression that she is seriously considering her answer. The rain continued to fill the void made by the sudden silence.