60 for 60: Three Incidents of Rain

By Natalie Bevilacqua

Published only five years ago in 2017 in the Columbia Journal, “Three Incidents of Rain” follows a girl, then a woman, in her journey to comprehend tragedy and love, and the intersection of feeling at both extremes. Told from the ages of eight, thirteen, and twenty-five, the unnamed narrator recollects an early encounter with the morbid curiosity of humanity, revels in the first moments of queer love with a girl who thinks she can fly, and grapples with the sudden loss of her father in an accident. T Kira Madden’s sparse and evocative prose punches holes in itself, through which the reader can peek to intuit the various emotional registers on which each sentence operates. For example, Madden captures the disembodiment of grief as the narrator describes herself speaking to a coworker: “These are the things my mouth is saying.”

With perhaps one of my favorite structural conceits in literature—à la Scenes from a Marriage by Ingmar Bergman or One Day by David Nicholls—the story uses rain as an associative link between the moments and mines these points in time in the transportive present tense, which brings out memory’s tendency toward the sensorial and transient, the connective tissue between the instances formed only in hindsight. Ultimately, this story ate me out from the inside and, in a rush of simple, total sensation, brought to the surface glimpses of my own childhood memories. And I hope it does the same for you.

Three Incidents of Rain

T Kira Madden

After The Case of the Flying Boy

1.

I am eight years old in my parent’s blue Jaguar. A song spills out from the car radio. The voice sings something about an operator, a direct call, the spare coins of this past that I have never lived, and the arrangement of these words and the pitch in which the man sings them makes my whole jaw ache. Maybe my parents spoke over the song but I don’t remember their voices. I remember the car slowing down and the trees bowing in their South Florida sway. The storm beating down. My legs spread across the whole backseat. My father leans into the car horn and the man inside the radio stops singing. What we eventually pass are two cars crunched against a truck—the truck’s lumber in the rain scattered straight and holy like matchsticks on glass. On the other side of the median, brilliant yellow raincoats pick up objects around the crash: a slice of fender, a motorcycle helmet, a mashed ball of yarn, a purse.

When our car speeds ahead and the yellow people become nothing but bloated yellow raindrops on the rearview window I ask why we slowed in the first place. Nothing was in our way, I say. It was on the other side, I say. My mother looks at me through the space between headrest and seat. She says we all slow down when other people have an accident, that’s just the way of it, you understand. She says it’s only fair we get to look.

2.

I am thirteen years old, stoned for the first time on a school night. Stacey Skurka is my best friend and I am in love with her. She’s black and I’m Chinese and we are both girls but none of that changes the way I feel about her until we’re both women. Stacey tells me to stand in the woods behind her house and wait for her. She bought paper wings that actually fly. The wings are six feet wide if you round up, tacked with tape and browned around the edges, and Stacey is going to fly from her bedroom window into my arms. Because we are stoned and because I’m in love and because the midnight rain makes me feel worthy of something, I wait for her. In seconds, or minutes, or neither seconds nor minutes, Stacey comes tumbling down from the tree behind me. Her wings are bent up as coat hangers, the paper torn. No matter, she’s mine for now with her hands around my waist and she says, Did you see me coming? Did you see me fly?

Later that night, in Stacey’s bedroom, we listen to things fly against Stacey’s parents’ bedroom wall. We’re not sad about it, but we lalala under the covers to hush out the smashing. Stacey asks if I ever kissed a boy at my old school and I lie and say, Yes. Stacey says, Teach me and our noses smash together before I can answer. It is too dark under the covers to believe what is happening, so I press my knees together hard and pray that it never stops. I pray that it happens and happens to me until I’m dead, but Stacey says Quit it, crazy, and we both laugh it off.

Once she’s falling asleep Stacey asks if I’m lying about the kissing thing. I say, Get lost. I ask if she lied about the flying thing. She crosses her heart. But Stacey Skurka couldn’t have flown to me—I know that now. Her window had been shut.

3.

I am twenty-five years old at my first corporate Christmas party. My father died last week. We are below deck on a ship howling down the Hudson and there are flute players, streamers, neon track lights freckling the carpet. An elf offers me a glass of champagne from a mirrored tray sprinkled with waxy snow. I take it. I’m looking for the exit stairs when somebody says, We all feel bad for you, you know, an accident like that.

This somebody introduces herself as a new receptionist named Patrice. The accident to which Patrice is referring is my father’s, how last Wednesday he walked through a storm to the West-T-Go gas station in Abilene, Texas, how he was struck by a Peterbilt carrying the single wing of a windmill-simple as that. The rain had fogged the windows into a smear. They found his dentures first. These are the things my mouth is saying to Patrice, though the story always changes.

I lift the drink to my face and Patrice notices the ring on my left middle finger-a blue tourmaline but I tell her it’s sapphire. I tell her my father gave me this ring when I turned sixteen, that I never take it off, but that is also not true. What’s true is that I only wish somebody would listen, do more than nod. I want Patrice to hold my sadness between her fingers, shine a light behind it, check for its clarity and worth. Nobody, still, has ever done that.

Instead, Patrice comments on the fried wontons staining her napkin, asks if I helped make them because I look like I could. I excuse myself from this conversation. What I need is some air, the rush of the water. I make my way to the stairs and ascend them sideways, a childhood habit, something I have only noticed lately. There is a way in which death makes us superstitious, sentimental for our simpler selves.

On deck, the freeze is a match-head strike to the face.

Santa Claus is sitting on a bench out here, slow-dragging on a clove. It’s dark but there’s no mistaking the limp hat, the pebbly boots. He says, That’s one hell of a girl, and motions me over. When I stand next to his bench I see what he means-the Statue in the water. Every last foot of her. I remember learning about this statue as a kid, in a book that I read, and I tell Santa so. Her copper skin was torched and hammered over saddles of webbed steel. They built her up and disassembled her-the spade-shaped face, the toes-packed these body parts in crates, and now it feels like she was made for this one purpose, for me and Santa to know she is here. I want her to wear me like a pendant.

My mouth says, I wish my Dad were here, because I do that lately. I mention him with every new person I encounter-the deli man, a neighbor in the elevator-just to bring him into the room with me.

Santa offers me a clove, burns it up between his gloved hands, a single hoop of orange light around his face like that. I shake my head, No, even though I will remember the gesture.

My father died with no friends. Not one. His liver exploded—it was explained to me like that—and he paled from living thing to body in an armchair muddied with his own shit. The television went blaring for days.

I knew the warning signs but I never came to look. I still haven’t.

He asks me if I want to sit on his lap. I do. I gather the bottom of my dress and lift it above my knees. They are dry, no stockings, wrinkled as walnuts as I sit down and swing them atop his left thigh. He holds me, cloaks me in red. I move my face into the moon of his neck and his plastic beard smells like burnt onions. His ears are pierced all over with tiny sterling studs.

And what is it that you want for Christmas? he asks me. There is nothing I have ever wanted more than for his voice to sound older, wiser, a husk wrapped around the words. But here it is, a sweet-stretched taffy voice, earnest and slow saying, How about a kiss?

I wish I could tell you about his cruelty, the snap in his eyes, the change, as he pulled me in closer and tighter to his body while I heaved and shook. But no, it was much worse than that, and far more painful. It was kind.