Free One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks Page A

they must heft from place to place. Once she too took that long trek to a faraway continent and for some reason it was equally important that she bring as much as she could carry and more. But why? Surely when you are going here and there only a couple of outfits suffice, nobody’s going to see you long enough to notice, for one thing. But how fragmentary and partial it seemed, that heavy bag of hers! She had not yet learned how little she needed really. She hadn’t even gotten rid of her parents.
    The best laid plans of underpackers are felled by rain. You need a couple of heavy outfits, one to dry while you wear the other, especially if the rain continues. One summer biking in Europe she took one of those instant raincoats, the kind packed into a baggie. It didn’t rain once that trip and she was grateful. So she didn’t use the coat until she was on a ride up to Lion’s Bay with some insanely chipper members of the local bike club. She stayed behind in the corner store, drinking coffee, while they went up a mountain just for the fun of it and came back.
    To her mind the route they took to the village and home was a joke, a cruel one. The road undulated, a picture-book snake. Up the hill. Down the hill. Up the next hill. She imagined planners chortling as they decreed: put up the signs here, tell cyclists they are welcome. If they survive.
    The familiar drops began to stipple her in warning on the return. She stopped at the top of the hill, and unfolded her raincoat. She was pleased with her foresight. The plastic was much thinner than she had expected, its area enormous. She arranged the thing over her clothes as best she could and set off. As she gathered speed a flapping, crackling noise grew around her. It was the giant garbage bag of the raincoat, catching wind like a sail.

63.
    Her son away tonight, rain holds off. In the clouds as she leaves work, though, a muttered threat. Rain tonight puts her in mind of toughs who pass a bit too close in the school hallway, bump you sort-of accidentally into the lockers. The cool and clang of it. Go ahead, complain. Come on, report us. The menace of rain, impending.
    She chains up, walks quickly through the whooshing automatic doors of the store. Dinner to get. Something to eat. Her head bowed, face averted: no-see-um.
    Out on the street again, the rain takes its first tentative shoves, tries its weight, like a bully dancing on tiptoe. Water, skycut, jabs unprotected faces & necks and as quickly retreats. She picks up her steps, hurries a little faster along the ugly street of shops. Almost done now, almost time to turn towards home.
    Inside her own door at last, barricaded behind stone and brick, she is brave enough to face rain foursquare. Curled lip. Ostentatious flick of sleeve: see, dry.
    Imagines herself, good as untouched.

64.
    Today rain falls faster than ever, as if human hurry is catching. Rain a sudden model of efficiency. The consultants came some time ago. They crowd the clouds, measuring drops per square inch. They catch and weigh individual drops, calculate area saturated by length of time. They have reports to make, procedures to recommend. Good news. With proper use of technology, they declare in triumph, rain can be made to fall that much faster.
    It’s true rain has never been exactly, how you say, career weather. Drifting and dropping, that’s pretty much the extent of rain’s job description. If rain had a resumé it would be a little puffy thing, a breath of wet air that disappeared when someone opened the envelope. Someone in a little room in a little office into which no rain is allowed, ever.
    This is the way of the new world and rain can’t fall behind. Hurry up, faster. Check your phone. Text someone. Check the website, get directions, grab another coffee (large, larger, largest: you decide), check your email, check your texts. Text someone else. Go over here, go over there, send another email, try to set up a