Free The Value Of Rain by Brandon Shire

fingertips. He pointed at them before they had a chance to melt to their element.
    I shrugged again. I hated charades. I looked around the circle but no one else seemed to understand either, and at this particular moment I just didn’t care.
    “Coin of the Gods,” a voice rumbled outside our small group of miscreant mourners. The circle parted like a wave. It was Tiny.
    “Water is life.” Tiny said.”Coin of the Gods. It has value. Its absence equals death.”
    I looked at Thai who nodded enthusiastically. The gods were displaying their reverence for that tortured young soul by filling the world with his namesake. I put my hand on Thai’s shoulder and thanked him. The circle broke up and I was left alone to watch a silent ambulance penetrate the mute night and disappear in a dance of angels.
     
    *****
     
    “He wasn’t stable Charles. It wasn’t your fault,” Caufield told me first thing the next day.
    I said nothing. I stared at the floor in his office. All the tears I had to shed had fallen. I knew Snow’s death wasn’t my fault, yet I still felt responsible, as if I had failed him somehow; the news of my possible release pushing him to the very act of permanence he had always sought to avoid.
    “Are you ready for this?” Caufield asked me.
    I looked up at him. “No.”
    “Me either,” he replied. I stopped looking through him and looked at him.
    He shrugged. “It’s a big step. I want you out of here and I want you to succeed, but that lever you hold against the dam of malice you think no one sees is liable to snap once you get beyond these walls.
    “And you don’t think it’s justified?” I demanded, suddenly red faced and hostile.
    “I think it’s very justified,” Caufield answered quietly. “But I don’t think exchanging this institution for another is a very wise choice. Do you?”
    I stood and held my arms out, the same pose I would strike for Charlotte a decade later. It showed the strength of my weakness. Like Charlotte, Caufield didn’t buy it either. He motioned me to sit, an unamused frown on his face.
    “We have a hundred men here who’ve committed acts more savage than you would think Tiny capable of. Most of them had much less provocation and substantially less time to brood.” He let that sit between us for a moment before we moved on to the true reason for me being in his office this morning. “What are your expectations from this meeting?”
    “None. I don’t expect shit.”
    “So you can’t be disappointed.”
    “Exactly,” I answered.
    “Valid, but not exactly honest, is it?”
    I queried the floor again with my eyes. He was talking validity, and I was thinking about how all three of the men I had grown attached to were putrefying in the ground somewhere. How everything I attached myself to was yanked away from me.
    There was a hesitant knock on the door and I looked up at Caufield in a panic.
    “You have nothing to fear, Charles. We’ve spoken dozens of times. He just wants to reassure himself that you’re not some raving madman.”
    “But I am.”
    Caufield froze me to my seat with a look before he got up and answered the door.
    When it opened I heard the whispery paper noises of a handshake but could not bring myself to turn around; my neck was too stiff and my eyes deadened by all the accolades and frustrations I had poured on this stranger over the years. All I could focus on was the snow trickling down through the window behind Caufield’s desk.
    My father had been many things to me over the years, but at the moment I could not think of one of them. The number of times my imagination had honed him into the molds of hero and villain and back again were beyond count. Thus, my fear was that if I looked upon him he would forever be cemented into one of the arduous and implacable castes I had designed for him.
    When he sat in the chair beside me I began to feel his gaze hot on my skin. Assessing me, analyzing, with his naïve eye, the tics and marks my