Rain

The leaves were so still that even Bibi thought it was going to rain. She was usually wrong about these things- things like the weather, or what time it was, or how long it would take to make dinner. The whole town knew not to trust her with any answer. At first it had shamed her, to have such a reputation, but after so many long years, she had learned to adapt. She even took to purposefully telling people the wrong answer, or saying the wrong things, so that it was impossible to tell what she made into a joke and what she truly didn’t know. Her husband hated this about her – so much so that he often refused to talk to her seriously – but when she was alone, she would think of things she could say and laugh.
Lightning cracked soundlessly through the dim evening sky, throwing strange shadows across the field beside her home. Shuddering at how big the storm was bound to be, Bibi hurried outside to the clothesline and began tearing things out of the air, throwing them helter-skelter into her old wooden basket. The exertion made her hot, but she didn’t stop to wipe the sweat from her forehead; she didn’t know how much time she might have.
“Waddaya doin’?” Bibi looked up to see her husband pushing his way between two corn stalks. He approached her slowly, walking with the sort of limp that is brought on only by long years in the sun.
“Bringin’ the laundry in. It’s about t’ rain, can’t ya see?”
He laughed loudly, his voice booming as lightning lit the sky again. “You crazy, woman? It’s too hot t’ rain!” She narrowed her eyes at him and looked pointedly at the sky, which only made her husband laugh harder. “Tha’s a heat storm, you crazy old woman!” And he kissed her cheek firmly, as if to lighten the blow.
Bibi continued to gather the laundry, though she moved more slowly now. She was trying to be good-natured, but things just seemed different today. She wasn’t sure how.
When she got inside, her husband had already pulled off his boots and climbed child-like into his armchair in front of the T.V. Setting the laundry on the kitchen table, she took a package of chicken out of the freezer and set it on the table to defrost.
“Dinner’ll be ‘bout another hour, Henry,” she said, and he waved his hand vaguely through the air to show that he had heard. She looked at the back of his head for a minute, lost in those pleasant thoughts of nothing that one sometimes gets, and then coming back to herself, she went upstairs.
Two hours later, they were just sitting down for dinner when another bolt of lightning shocked the sky. Bibi jumped up from the table, shrieking “See! See!” while her husband watched her in bemusement.
“Bibi, set yourself down so’s we can eat. It ain’t going t’ rain.”
“Look how dark the sky is, though! It ain’t like that every night! You can barely see the barn!” The statement was hardly true at all – in fact, the sky was a strange purple color that neither Bibi nor her husband had ever seen before. The color wasn’t the friendly, cheery color that Bibi worked into her quilts, but the color of breathlessness, or of death.
Bibi sat down resignedly at the table once more, but she couldn’t do more than pick at her food. When her husband had finished his meal, she cleared her own plate as well, throwing a few scraps out the door for the wild animals to eat. She didn’t put out as much as she normally would; convinced as she still was that it was going to rain, she didn’t figure that many animals would be venturing around.
That night, Bibi couldn’t sleep; everything was too still to her well-tuned ears. How her husband could fail to miss the chirping of crickets from the field, or the rustling of leaves in the tree outside their bedroom she couldn’t say, but finally it became too much for her to take. Quietly, she climbed out of her bed – her husband grumbling in his sleep – and grabbing her night robe, Bibi made her way out of the house.
Outside, she let her slipper-clad feet stomp loudly against the ground as she marched toward the fields. “It should have rained today, it should have!” Her muttering was the only sound to be heard for miles around.

“My God!” She screeched, once she had reached the center of the field, a place she knew because the ground sloped up just slightly, not more than few small feet, to form a point. “My God, but I thought it was going to rain!” Lightning cracked the midnight air, cracked Bibi’s scull like the striking of a gong, except that no once was there to hear or see. Bibi fell silently to the hard, dry ground, and the sky opened up, and it poured.



**Author's Note: This story was borne of an assignment for my fiction writing class. The first line is actually the first from the story "The Storm" by Kate Chopin.