Rainy Night

I had reached the last page, and I kept looking at it as if the ink might rearrange itself if I waited long enough.

My thumb rested on the edge of the paper. Once, I even tried to turn it, knowing there was nothing left to turn to.

Rain ticked against the bedroom window. It had been falling since the afternoon, smearing the buildings across the street until only their lit windows survived. A car rolled through a puddle below, and I lifted my head at the sound and stared out without seeing anything. In the kitchen, a bowl of noodles had gone cold on the counter. Somewhere in the last fifty pages, I had stopped eating.

When my gaze drifted back to the book in my lap, I still didn’t want to read the page again. Closing the cover felt strangely final. I let my thumb linger. Then I folded it shut and rested my hand flat on top, as if I were keeping something from getting out.

“That was cruel,” I whispered.

My voice sounded embarrassingly small in the room. I wiped my cheeks on the sleeve of my sweater and found them wet again a moment later. I had cried over stories before. Attaching myself to people who existed only on paper was hardly a new habit. Usually, though, I could close the book and begin to let them go. Tonight I couldn’t stop glancing at the cover.

It was the teacher I couldn’t let go of, the one who had always seemed impossible to defeat. Some ridiculous part of me wanted to flip back a few pages and check again, as though I might have missed the line where he came back. I wanted one more chapter in which someone reached him in time. Where he could finally lean on a person and rest. After everything he had done for everyone else, surely he deserved that much.

Then there was the boy who always put everyone ahead of himself. I knew he’d found a reason to keep going. But the centuries ahead of him frightened me. Imagine watching your friends and family grow old while you stayed exactly as you were. How long before you began wishing people would stop saying how fast the years had gone?

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I kept seeing them as they’d been at the beginning, before I knew how much they would lose. Back then I had worried and turned the page, trusting there was still time for things to work out. Now all I wanted was to go back with everything I knew and warn them.

I picked up my phone, meaning to text someone. Someone who would understand. I scrolled through my contacts twice and put it down again.

“It’s just a story,” I told myself.

I stood and carried the book to the shelf beside my bed. Passing the window, I caught my reflection in the dark glass: swallowed by my old sweater, chestnut hair escaping its bun, eyes rubbed raw. I tucked a loose strand behind my ear and scrubbed under my eyes again. Still red. Wonderful.

Beyond my reflection, the windows across the street glowed. People were cooking dinner, watching television, getting ready for bed. Somewhere, someone laughed. In one kitchen a lamp burned over a table, and I imagined something sweet baking, the kind of ordinary comfort that made me want to cross the street and sit down in the middle of it. The world had the nerve to carry on as usual. Maybe that was its way of reminding me that warmth still existed.

A raindrop slid down the pane, merged with another, and vanished. Behind me the book sat on its shelf. The room was quiet but not empty. Rain murmured against the glass, and the glow of the lamp beside my bed gathered around me like a hand on my shoulder.

“I wish I’d been there,” I said to the room. “I would have done anything to change it.”

I knew how that sounded. Wanting didn’t rewrite pages. Even inside the story, wanting wouldn’t have been enough. There were enemies I wouldn’t have known how to face, and choices I might not have understood until it was too late. But I kept imagining it anyway: catching someone’s sleeve before they could walk away. They would turn. They would listen. They would decide to stay.

I switched off the lamp and climbed into bed. Tomorrow there were messages to answer and a pile of laundry on the chair that had long since stopped pretending to be clean. I turned onto my side and settled my cheek against the cool pillow. I was tired enough to sleep, though my mind seemed determined to keep me company a little longer. I lay listening to the rain until my thoughts stopped making sense and sleep took me.

The rain grew louder, close enough now that I could feel it on my cheek. I opened my eyes and reached for the duvet. My fingers found something rough and wet instead. I pulled back, blinked, and reached again.

Bark.

I was standing beside a tree with water running off its branches onto my shoulders. For several seconds I waited for the room to come back into focus. It didn’t. There was mud under my feet, roots twisting across the ground, and beyond them only the dark shapes of more trees.

I tried to remember getting out of bed. I could still feel the cool pillow against my cheek, but rain was running down my neck, and I had nothing to pull around myself.

Something moved between the trunks.

A girl stumbled into view a few meters away. She was small, her pale hair darkened by rain and plastered across her face, one hand clamped to her side. She caught herself against a tree, barely paused, and looked back over her shoulder. Even before I saw her face, I could tell how frightened she was.

“Hello?” I shouted over the rain.

She didn’t react. I stepped closer. “Are you hurt?”

She lifted her head. Through the wet strands of her hair I caught wide eyes, and for a moment we only looked at each other. I raised a hand, unsure whether she was afraid of me too.

Then something cracked deeper in the forest.

She flinched, looked past me, and ran. I went after her without thinking, catching my foot in the undergrowth, losing her between the trees and finding her again. She ran lopsided, one arm still pinned to her body, glancing back every few steps. I couldn’t tell whether she was checking on me or on whatever was behind us.

“Wait! Let me help you!”

Her foot caught on a root. She stumbled and I lunged, and as she turned back she reached out with her free hand. Her eyes locked on mine. I stretched farther, certain I could reach her.

Her fingertips brushed mine.

Then she wasn’t there. My hand hung in empty air, much closer to the ground than it had been a moment ago. For a second the ground vanished. Then my foot plunged into mud and pain tore through my side, white and sudden. I stumbled and barely caught myself.

Something cracked behind me. I was already running.

Branches clawed my arms and tangled in my hair. One hand had pressed itself to my ribs without my deciding it. Rain streamed into my eyes. A trunk loomed, then a snarl of roots; I swerved, tripped on a fallen branch, and hit the ground hard enough to see sparks. I couldn’t pull in enough air. When I looked down, blood was seeping between the fingers I’d pressed to my side. The hand looked strangely small. A crash behind me yanked my head up before I could think about that. I was reaching for her. How did I get hurt?

I looked for the girl as I ran. She had been close enough to touch, but now I couldn’t see her between the trees. I wanted to turn back and find her. Another crash sounded behind me, and I kept running. It’s a dream. I fell asleep in my own bed, and I’m going to wake up there. I held on to that as hard as I held my side. But dreams weren’t supposed to hurt like this.

I tried to look back once. The moment I slowed, panic shoved me forward again. Branches shook somewhere beyond my shoulder. Whatever was behind me didn’t go around the undergrowth. It pushed straight through, snapping what I’d had to climb over. Beneath the splintering wood came a deep, uneven sound that might have been breathing.

“Wake up,” I said between breaths.

My foot skidded on a wet root. I grabbed a trunk and dragged my palm across the bark, and bit back a cry. The scrape burned with every flex of my fingers. I tried to picture my bedroom, but I couldn’t hold on to it. The rain and the forest kept getting in the way.

“Wake up. Please.”

All I could hear was rain and the thing behind me. It was always close. Every time I thought I’d gained distance, another branch broke.

Ahead, the trees thinned. A pale gap showed between the trunks, and for one desperate moment I thought it was a road. I imagined headlights swinging around a bend, a car slowing, a door held open, warmth. Someone I could call to.

I burst out of the trees and my shoes slid in the mud. I threw my weight backward, staring at the place where the ground simply stopped, barely a step ahead. Beyond it the mountainside dropped into darkness. Mist drifted between the cliffs, hiding the bottom. Far below, water struck rock. I backed away from the edge and turned toward the forest. There had to be another way.

The trees stood close and black. I searched the gaps for the one I’d come through, but nothing moved. Whatever had been crashing behind me had gone quiet. That was worse. I listened harder, afraid of missing the sound of it coming closer.

I edged sideways along the cliff, looking for ground that widened into a path. Pain caught beneath my ribs before I had gone a step. I folded over, pressing harder, and felt blood run down my wrist with the rain. For a few seconds I could only stand there trying to breathe through it, knees shaking, wishing someone would tell me which way to go.

I didn’t know what was chasing me or why it wanted me. But each time I thought of stepping back into the trees, my body refused. I had been running before I understood what I was running from. Some part of me knew, flatly, that I could not let it catch me.

A tree at the edge of the clearing shook. Its branches bent outward as something pushed between them. A limb cracked and fell. I was already staring at the shape behind it. I tried to find its face and couldn’t work out where a face should be.

What I took for an arm reached for the ground and bent in a way that turned my stomach. The rest of it dragged forward beneath the branches, unfolding as it came, until it was far too tall to have passed between those trees. I wanted to look away, but I was terrified of what it would do if I stopped watching. I took a step back, then another, no longer feeling my side. My heel found nothing.

I threw myself forward and clawed at the ground as my foot slid off the edge. My torn palm slammed against wet stone. Pain shot up my arm, but I pressed down, searching for anything to grip. One foot held. For a moment I thought I could haul myself back. Then the mud crumbled under my shoe.

I grabbed at loose earth. The edge slid past my fingers. Through the rain I thought I saw someone standing among the trees, perfectly still, and I stretched toward them without knowing whether they were close enough to help. My fingers closed on rain.

The cliff rose above me and I understood that I was falling. A cry caught in my throat as the air tore past my face. I couldn’t find anything to hold. The trees shrank, their branches blurring together until I couldn’t tell where I had been standing.

Had someone been there? Had they stood among the trees and watched me go over?

Above them, the clouds parted just enough to show a narrow stretch of sky.

I fixed my eyes on it and waited for the jolt that would wake me. Any second now I would see my own ceiling and feel the duvet tangled around my legs, and I would lie there catching my breath until I could convince myself it had only been a dream. I could still remember the cool pillow against my cheek. I thought of the book on its shelf, closed, with the lamp off above it, and wanted very badly to be reading it.

But I kept falling.