Free The Rainy Season by James P. Blaylock Page A

the sound of the drops pinging off the aluminum roof over their small front porch and the gurgle of rainwater running in the gutters and downspouts outside the window. Even in the rain, the big black grackles were calling to each other up and down the block. She wondered what day it was, whether it was a school day, and then she recalled that her mother was dead, and suddenly she knew she wouldn’t fall back asleep, even though it was Saturday morning.
    She sat up in bed and drew her curtains back, looking out onto the lawn and the big puddle that had formed in the low part beneath the swing under the elm tree. The morning was gray, the curb trees heavy with rainwater, their trunks stained black like the asphalt street. She slipped her hand under her pillow and found the little wooden box that she’d hidden under there last night.
    She listened for movement in the hallway outside the door, but there was only silence. Holding the box carefully in her hand, she tipped it toward the daylight through the window and opened the lid, tilting it back on its hinge. Inside lay the glass inkwell, the squat neck of the bottle bent crazily to one side as if the glass had at one time gotten hot and started to melt. The base of the bottle was crisscrossed with dirty surface-deep cracks, and the clarity of the blue-tinted glass walls was obscured by cloudy patches, so that the bottle looked as if it had lain for years in the depths of a furnace. As far as she knew it hadn’t; it had belonged to her grandmother, who had given it to her mother a long time ago. Her mother had told Betsy that it was a family heirloom, and the most precious thing she had: it was a
memory
, she had said, of Betsy’s grandmother.
    The day had come when Betsy had finally understood this, although she didn’t understand the bottle itself at all. It wasn’t just any old inkwell, and it wasn’t just made out of any old glass. Although it was probably her imagination, the shape of the cloudy patches in the walls of the thing seemed to change subtly over time—too slowly for her to observe the changes, slower even than the hour hand on a clock. She stared at those clouds now, and it was easy to believe that she was looking into an almost infinite blue sky, and that the clouds were drifting on a slow wind from somewhere far away.
    A flurry of raindrops spattered against the window, and she watched the rivulets of water running on the glass, obscuring the view of the street and the lawn, isolating her from the world. Carefully she spilled the glass trinket out of the shallow wooden box and onto the rumpled bedspread. For a moment she let it lie there, her gaze wandering from the bedspread to the hundreds of books in the bookcases, and back to the window again and the rainy morning. Slowly, without looking at the inkwell, she let her hand drift down along a ridge of bedspread until she knew she was nearly touching the blue glass. It seemed to her that the air was heavier around it, that it resisted her touch, but only in some feeble, almost teasing way. She closed her fingers partway around it, still not quite touching it, then shut her eyes and pressed her hand against the warm, living glass …
    … immediately she was dreaming, although even in her dreaming she was wary, ready to drop the inkwell when she had to. She seemed to hover over herself, as if she were floating above the woman lying on the bed below—not her own bed—and at the same time she
was
the woman who lay on that bed. She was in an old room made of wood, and there was sunlight through open windows and warm air blowing the curtains, as if it were breezy outside. She could smell something on the breeze—flowers, she guessed. She remembered this from last time, and the memory relaxed her, because she knew what was coming, and there wouldn’t be any surprises. An old woman stood at a dresser with a basin of steaming water on top of it, and the bed was covered with sheets. The woman was a midwife,