The Day It Did Not Rain

I BLAME YOU, DALÍ.

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He had been there for he did not know how long, bathing in the heat so thick it twisted the landscape up like a stained napkin crumpled on an empty plate. The land was flat here, and he could see forever, if forever ended in a hazy blue-beige line.

At his back he thought maybe there were rocks or pebbles or grains of sand, something pressing up against his shirt, starched by the salt of dried sweat. He thought his hat had fallen somewhere over there, just out of sight along with the newly painted sign for a town hidden behind the forever-blue-beige line. He thought maybe his feet were bleeding, but how could that be, when the sun baked everything lifeless, slowed everything thing down to such a sluggish pace not even blood would flow?

He had sand in his throat. Or maybe there was no sand and his throat had turned into sand– sand oozing from the walls of his windpipe like water condensing on the side of a cool, crisp glass. Maybe the air was sand, and he was breathing it in with every ragged breath, but it got trapped in his chest and all he puffed out was stale carbon dioxide that could barely stir the breezeless afternoon.

He didn’t think he still had his arms. He could feel something scratching at them, but he could not move them. Maybe he had forgotten them, left them behind at the last sign he saw for the town that was so close, so close like black clouds so heavy one could taste the thunder in the air.

He told himself he was almost there. He told himself he only had a little further to go, just a bit, like he had told himself at the sign before and the sign before that. But his legs were over there, and his feet were back there, and his face was squinting at itself far over there, and the rest of him was here, melting away into the hungry ground. His skin sizzled like a good, hardy breakfast, and he could hear his wife putting water on to boil, plip plip plip. He was shaving right now, letting the water run free from the faucet, all shimmering and cold and completely wasted, all of it, what the hell was he doing?

He shut off the faucet and finished up and went into the kitchen. He greeted Sylvie with a kiss and she giggled and ran her fingers over his newly shaved jaw, eyed his lips like they were candied almonds, and handed him a plate with three strips of fat bacon and a boiled egg, cut neatly in half. For herself she made the small bowl of cereal and another egg, and they sat down and they feasted.

“Has the paper came yet?” he asked.

And she said, “No, it’s Tuesday.”

“And the mail?”

“It’s Tuesday, sweetest.”

So he took her arm and pulled her naked body down onto the bed with him, eggshell white and clammy, and he held her so close like she was the only piece of the earth left. She smiled with her snowflake teeth and he kissed her eyes and she took a bite of his shoulder, crunching it like fresh watermelon.

“It’s a bit stringy,” Sylvie said to his mother.

“It’s can’t be helped, the meat just comes like this,” his mother replied. “Here, try this.”

His mother cut the top of a lemon off and passed it across the table to Sylvie. Sylvie squeezed it, juice flitting over her fingers and dripping all over his thigh, cut to tiny pieces on her plate. His mother was working his hand with a knife, and wet red pieces feel from the bone like rain slipping down a bus window while a girl in his third grade class stared out at her house, so far up the driveway, and the weather beat at the roof and she wouldn’t go, she didn’t have an umbrella, her art project would be ruined.

He smoked a pack a week for six months when he was nineteen, and his voice hadn’t been the same since. But he was still in good health, he still had a job, Sylvie loved him, his parents loved him, Duncan was dead but Sylvie loved him. When he got to the town he would call Sylvie, tell her he was alright, alright, he was fine, he could make it, just a bit more.

When he sat down to take a break, he remembered he was lying in pieces in the sun and his eyes felt like raisins even when they were closed. Forever was a blue-beige line he could never reach, and behind that was the town that was so close, and he could call Sylvie but he couldn’t.

The sky was above him, was blue like the ocean, like so much water splashing around him. His pores sucked it up, he was a sponge, unfit to move but still living until he was in someone’s shower, and he would still suck up water but he would be dead. The sky was so beautiful, like Sylvie’s eyes, like the screen before the movie plays, like fancy paper waiting for a fancy message, like the sky.

As he lay dying, he tried to swallow the sky with his eyes, for it was all he had left.

“Ah,” he thought, marveling at this one last gift to him, just for him. “It’s a good thing it did not rain.”