A Forecast of Rain Over California

I sat in my mom’s old kitchen chair. My parents had kept this dinner set for years, even after years of abuse from sticky children that stabbed plastic knives into every leg of the table. Still, my dad took good care of it for as long as he was alive. The orange varnish still shined comfortingly, and the lines I used to trace my fingers over still contrasted strikingly against the wood surrounding them. When I leaned back in the chair, far enough for my feet to stop touching the ground, I could almost imagine being seven again, swinging legs and grinning anticipation for my grandmother’s casserole.

My husband walked into the house to a screaming kettle and a napping wife. He ran to remove the pot from the stove before grabbing me, surprising me awake. It took a second, but I figured out that I fell asleep. Jensen was laughing before I could even apologize. I wanted to be angry or frustrated that he wasn’t seeing how exhausted I was, but I let go of my breath and laughed along with him.

“Been busy cleaning out the basement?” He knew that my goal was to finish that one tonight, but doing it alone felt insurmountable, especially with the stacks of books and the occasional heat shocks when the A/C forgot that it was supposed to circulate down there too. The electricity was slowly beginning to fizzle out, even here in California, where the remnants of the government were fighting hard to control the few resources they had left. If only they worked as dauntlessly to save the grain and vegetables.

“I was getting to it. I just got tired.”

“Have you still been getting jittery?” This question made my chest puff up in irritation, and my eyes were pulled to the stove where I was tempted to clutch the burning kettle, if only to feel something more painful and intense than the anger welling up inside me. I wasn’t sure why him calling it the jitters made me so mad. There was no other word for it. If I tried explaining it more than I already have, then I’m sure I would cry and it’s so disrespectful to cry in front of one’s husband. I questioned for a minute why I was still concerned with social decorum, even though I was the one to sneak us out of the east and into the desert. I rebuilt our car with the mountains of metal that had been sitting in my grandfather garage, right next to where we used to live, and I was the one who sped down the highways, avoiding the blazing carcasses of vehicles that lit up the roads, almost fully replacing the streetlights that used to guide us.

I felt myself hesitate and used that moment of uncertainty to try and find the words that encapsulated the flaringingly angry highs, the absent lows when I can barely pull myself out of the backseat of our car to keep us moving, when I ponder drinking the alcohol in the back of my father’s corner pantry to wash out the parasite inside of me. I put my hands on my stomach and I feel the dread of another human life, excitement to see what they become, and the knowledge that I am not a mother, nor should I ever be. No, that job is for my idiotic husband, who still could never fathom these thoughts, not even if I laid them in as bare terms as a pre schooler. Even before the scalding rain hit, we never discussed anything more complicated than “jitters”. No one did. There was my answer.

“No, the jitters have gone away. I’m okay, just tired. We still have to clean out the house and fortify it before the next storm, and that’s not even mentioning finding some food.”

The best part about California is that there is no rain. Climate change ensured that. Although that was the point that made most homebuyers avoid the state, that mindset changed two weeks ago, after the first of what they called a nuclear storm. Acid rain also works, but most weathermen sidestepped the term due to its history. Most weathermen, that is, until those left disappeared or burned up in the ravaging storms. Unluckily for me, or luckily now I guess, my mother passed just a few months before the lethal rains started up, leaving a safe house in California for my growing family. I felt overwhelming guilt over not being there for her last few moments and a heaviness stronger than the grief we were allowed before the storms, stronger than the sadness I held onto for the months succeeding my father’s death, but I pushed it down in order to stand up and shuffle down the stairs of the basement. Jensen followed slowly after, humming a cheerful tune beneath his breath. He seemed happy just to be here, satisfied with his run for groceries in the small safe zone a few miles out.

The basement was as dank and stifling as when I left it, the wet air clinging to my bare arms and legs. I almost regretted wearing a skirt instead of jeans, knowing that the skirt was much cooler but left much more of me exposed. The stacks of books made a walkway from the stairs, books of eras and centuries past opening up to toys that we grew up with that shockingly hadn’t degraded into obscurity yet. I deftly grazed one for a second, imagining for a second my own son or daughter playing with it before banishing the image with a twist in my stomach. I moved past the toys and into old car parts that my grandfather must have sent my dad, past those to cardboard boxes that concealed their mourning contents, and finally back to stacks of my mom’s stuff that she had been too lazy to sort into boxes in her final days. Despite her only being sixty at her death, I was surprised her fragile body made it down the stairs with all of these things in her arms.

I picked up the first thing that stood out to me while Jensen examined some of the car parts, presumably hoping to recognize one of the things I attached to our old Camry. There wasn’t a single thing there that I would’ve bothered touching. The chain in my hand made a new bid for my attention by gleaming in the reflection of the panel that Jensen was attempting to pick up, and I looked down to see a heart shaped locket. I cringed from the cliche but my mother was always a heart on her sleeve kind of person, especially when she was happy. Her jitters were quiet, slinking out to the yard where she could watch the sky, forgetting to respond to our questions for minutes at a time no matter how incessant we were.

I looked in the locket, but the only person there was my mom. She had a beautiful smile on her face, and although the picture was old, the sharp lines detailed the wrinkles in her cheeks that followed her to death, and the frizzy hair that didn’t have any white on it. I was most surprised that she had any physical pictures of herself at all - most photographs were automatically sent to the government in the past few years, and from there one could recall a memory and have the photo appear before them. She never loved the system, but she always used it to store the images of birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations from certification programs.

I looked past the necklace in my hand and instead moved towards the additional books stacked underneath it. These looked different from the paperbacks that were soiling in the entryway. These had the same whiff of mold, but were enveloped instead with soft, beaten leather. When I opened the books, they looked handmade and were filled with my mother’s cursive.

“What do you have there?” Jensen had come up behind me but the alien writing bored him quickly. He was back sorting another stack of parts before I could even get the answer out.

“I think they’re my mother’s journals,” I said to myself, since he was no longer listening. I thanked my mother silently for the first time since getting here, thanked her for giving us a language that would stay a secret between us forever now.

I looked back down at the curling pages, at the looping letters that spelled out my mom’s name at the end of the page, a beautiful sign off in the cursive letters that no one knew anymore - it hadn’t been taught to children in multiple generations, but my mom and grandmother and all of the women in my family kept it alive. I was the only one left.

Her journal opened with her talking about a heavy sadness. I felt her overwhelming tension headaches, and when her stress came, so did mine in heaving cramps. I felt myself well up with tears, but shoved them back down so that I could focus on the pain in the writing more so than the pain in my body. The sweat condensed on my legs in riverlets, but I stayed still and stood as she described her draw to strangle her child in the first months of its life, my life, until the feelings slowly dissipated into nothing. She grew to love me, but that replaced the love she felt for everything else in her life.

I didn’t hear the drops hitting the ceiling outside, mostly because screaming covered them. My screaming. Before I knew it, the sweat running down my legs was thicker and more tangible, and I realized that it hadn’t been perspiration at all, but my water breaking. Now there were small streams of blood.

Jensen bustled over to me. A pinhole of light, a tiny star on a black ceiling, appeared to the right of me and I realized that there must have been some damage to the house before we got there, a rain or two that left pockmarks. The downpour tonight would finish the job.

The stress made me scream, wishing I had done more repairs to the house before now, that I could’ve torn the car apart to line the roof instead. The basement was now the only place safe enough for this birth, and even our time here was limited.

The screaming continued, Jensen ran back and forth along my body, checking how far along we were. During quiet moments, I could focus enough to read the diary. I finally got to the moment that my dad bought my mom the necklace, an anniversary present, and how he died only two years later. My mom used to rub it whenever she got what were now called the jitters, until the ridges of the metal were smoothed and the design was barely legible. After his death, my mom put the one picture of her younger self that she had in there, hoping that she would find a way back to happiness again. Through my tears, I found the lines on the locket that made up curlicues and wings. The wings made me feel as if it were my mother with her wings, and I clasped it ever closer to me.

“Baby, are you okay?” His face was white with terror, but I found myself becoming numb to any emotions at all anymore. I stared blankly, nodding my assurances to him. His hands came away covered in blood, and his voice faded to a hollow din, far in the background. The room was growing lighter around me, and I barely felt his massive hands cup the back of my head. I felt nothing, heard nothing, as my eyesight blurred at the edges and the ceiling opened up. I was already gone when the rest of our world caved in.