Rain
Catherine Wang, Group 3: Fiction, Chinese International School
t is raining as the children wait at my feet for a story. They have formed a small, matted gaggle of straw-
like hair and clammy red cheeks, the silhouette of a peculiar beast almost ludicrous in its pitiful filthiness.
Small hands and feet, nothing more than claws of bone, shiver as they are numbed and wrinkled from the
cold, chilled by abuse. How unanimously silent and anonymous they are, how they have changed from fat
little babies into statues of change. It has been three months since the departures of their parents. Three
months of watery congee and hollow tears, the hunger and pain robbing youth of its emotion. I rub the raw sores
on my hands. Rain echoes within the empty walls of the room, the occasional whispers of trickling droplets
stroking the roof and descending, spinning, to land softly on the dirt floor.
“
Nai.” Wei speaks up. He still owns the soft, high-pitched melody of childhood, cracked by strain and
cold. “A story.”
The others shuffle around uncomfortably on the floor as though stirred by his words. Some nod and
mumble behind scabby masks of fatigue.
I sigh and massage the sides of my head with yellowed fingernails. “Yes, dear. A story. Give Nainai a
minute to think.”
The rain continues to fall, and I coax my eyes to a close, plowing through the maze of my misused
memory. I remember the beginning of some tales. There are the funny ones that start off with scenes of dancing
chickens and monkeys in a field or yard or shack eating dumplings and growing fat, and the majestic and
satisfying ones with the emperor in his golden yellow robes and the warriors charging forward on battlegrounds.
I know their endings, too. I always do, because the endings are always the truth. But the cores of the stories have
left, leaving behind empty stools and unused plates. I am unsure if whether the monkey pranks the emperor or a
pig, or if the warriors had a banquet with the chicken as they discuss myths and legends. I miss the times when
the words would roll off my tongue like melted sugar and formed wonderful pictures at my feet. There are no
pictures like that anymore. There is nothing but the soft sound of droplets sliding over the mud outside.
“
Listen, darlings.” I open my eyes. There is a spontaneous flurry of faces in my direction, like plants
curling towards the sun. “I will tell you the story of the rain. It starts with the present and develops backwards. It
begins with an ending and ends with a beginning.”
It is raining as I slowly slice the chives. Although I usually cry at the lash of the pungent, stinging scent
that each stroke beats out of the fibrous stalks to assault my sinuses, today I do not. My feel that my tears have
dried up long ago, an evanescent pool of emotion sapped by the harsh glare of reality. Don’t worry – this makes
my strong. I feel my tears have transformed into the freezing rain that now trickles down the streets. It teases me
as I squat by the cutting board. I remember a time when I looked into the rain and I was young and smooth,
beautifully impetuous, and how the rain stole this ephemeral image and replaced it with sallow, wrinkled skin,
callouses and warts, the dark tan of cold and frostbite upon my once attractive face. I remember a time when
there was always food upon the cutting-board and there were smiles upon the faces of the babies. ‘Remember
me?’ it cries from the hollow echoes of the past. ‘Remember me?’ The tears do not come.
I place the chives in the small clay pot in the pathetic fire that is kept alive only by wet sticks. I have to
peer into the empty grain bins and count each individual husk that forms a shallow layer of sustenance. The
barrels are empty and the fields are barren, wiped slowly by the moving rains. It will be a tough winter, one with
hollow stars and tears.
Mei and Wu run up to me from the inside of the house and ask for a story and dinner. I promise both
and allow my vision to rest out the window of the grey shack, beyond the uneven aisles of maize and corn, to
rest upon the trim outline of a complete wall in the distance. It stretches out through the hills in a roaring train of
defense, a snake or a dragon prowling through its territory and killing all who stray within its path. I sigh and
poke the fire. There is little I can do but to keep on for my grandchildren and myself. I walk into the room and
squat on the stool, waiting for them to arrive in a play of perverted routine.
It is raining as the bricks come in place. My children toil at work with the bricks and the laying and the
laying of the bricks, an infinite process of construction that seems almost inhumane. The wife sits a nearby
shack to cook for the workers that heave massive pounds of stone up treacherous slopes, as expendable as ants
to the insatiable hunger of the state. The husband works by pushing the back end of the chain of stones and
heaving sacks of raw cementing materials to the others. The emperor has left their children with their
grandmother and grandfather. They do not know that the grandfather has died of a wintry stroke a mere month
ago. They do not know this until they die of sheer exertion and starvation. They tell of this through an official
I