Sylvia Takes the Long Way Home

an excerpt from Rain I: Creatures of the Storm

Back when Sylvia Harmon had been more than one-third alive, when her late husband Chuck had still been the best machinist in the Anza Borrego, when he still slept beside her every night, she would had never have set foot in a bar like the Squire. Chuck didn’t care for drinking, after all, so she didn’t indulge.

Now only two things eased the everyday agony of living longer than Chuck: Bushmills straight up with a little ice, and the long, slow, murmur of aimless conversation that flowed like healing water along the bar at the Squire.

She didn’t have to agree with whoever was talking, or join in, or even understand what they were talking about. She just had to be there and let it tumble past her. It let her live a while longer.

The Bushmills, meanwhile, just let her sleep.

Sylvia lived in a studio apartment within walking distance of the Squire. She left it every morning at 11:00 a.m. and went back to it every night at 1:30 a.m. She had lunch and dinner at the bar. She would stay home every other Sunday and sleep through the day, maybe do a little laundry, pay a few bills out of the “comfortable” account that Chuck had left her. But she was always back in the Quonset, back at the bar, on Monday, sitting on her favorite stool. That was the whole of her life, from top to bottom and end to end.

And that was why leaving early on the first day of the Big Storm didn’t appeal to her – not one bit. She didn’t have a phone or a TV; Chuck had never had much use for them. She didn’t have a radio; he didn’t care for music. There was nothing waiting for her at home except a nightcap and a few extra hours sleep. That was why she tried to slow it down a little by holding on to her drink ‘till the very last, but that didn’t matter much. Frank, the frog-faced son of a bitch that owned the place, gave her the fish-eye, and she relented without a fight.

Sylvia had never been much of a fighter.

She watched that waitress, Jennie, send them all on their way: the Little Mother, trying so hard to make up for her missing baby. Sylvia had never had a baby of her own, but she could smell it on this one: there was a hole in her, wide as a child, and it would always be there. Helping these other people wouldn’t fill her up; it never did. So when it came Sylvia’s turn to go, after Sylvia had already wrapped herself in one of the ugly yellow slickers that idiot Richie had brought in – when that girl Jennie turned towards her and smiled all nice and warm – all Sylvia could do was shrug and say, “Nice try.”

The thing was, the pretty girl was a failure already. They were all failures. Or they wouldn’t be here.

Nobody said another word to her as she ducked into the rising storm and started her short walk home.

The parking lot was under three inches of water. Twice she hit pot holes that put her foot deep in a puddle so that brown muck gushed over the top of her shoe and soaked her socks. It reminded her of walking through tide pools at Manhattan Beach a long time ago, when she and Chuck had visited her cousins. She remembered the sea anemones, alive and prickly-spongey under her feet, squirting water between her toes when she stepped too hard.

It had been a short trip. Chuck hated the ocean. He had been in the Navy when he was a teenager and the salt water disgusted him so they never went back after that first time. That was one of the first things she hated him for, but they had only been married a short time back then, so she didn’t say anything. She just packed it away and kept going.

A few feet farther, the Big Storm had already Duncan Avenue into a south-flowing river. A tumbleweed, gray as newsprint and whistling in the wind, rolled through the air right in front of her. She could feel the acid breeze of it as it grazed her nose and disappeared into the gale, but it didn’t stop her. She just shrugged inside her bright yellow slicker and started to cross the flooded street.

The first step put her in water past her ankles. A few feet farther on and the water was surging halfway up her shins, almost to her knees. She had to haul at a lamp post to pull herself up onto the far curb, and as she touched it, the light at the top of the pole went POP! and blinked out for good.

Sylvia hadn’t been this wet since their summers together on Lake Mead. She remembered that leaky, dirty sailboat that Chuck rented at a discount every summer, and how hard she had to work to keep it decent. She hated that boat; she thought it was a waste of money, and the lake smelled funny and they could have spent all that cash on something really fun, like a weekend in Reno. But Chuck wanted it; he wanted to fish for nothing and drink beer with his buddies. So they went, and he fished and drank while she cooked and cleaned, as usual.

She hated him for making her do that, too, but they still went. Every year for seventeen years. She packed that away, too. But she kept going.

She trudged past a block of tiny one- and two-bedroom cottages on postage-stamp lots. Each set of warped wooden steps usually led down to a dying yard and some rusty lawn furniture. Today they led down to churning brown pools of muddy water. She and Chuck had owned one of these house for years and years, when he was a machinist for the Deschanel people. Then VeriSil showed up to save the town and Chuck took early retirement, and he sold their house to the new company. He didn’t ask Sylvia about it. He just did it. Got a good price, he said, and besides, they didn’t need that much room anymore. A studio would do. The proceeds could go into the “comfortable account,” and they would be fine. End of discussion.

That little house had been one of the very few things in her whole life that Sylvia had really loved. Especially in a life with no kids because Chuck wouldn’t have them and no travel except to the places that Chuck wanted to go and no TV or music because Chuck had had his fill of all of that in his younger days. So even now, that was probably the biggest piece of hatred she packed away – selling the house.

It probably had a lot to do with why she let him die.

She saw a dog, more dead than alive, huddled on the porch of a house just south of her last intersection. He was a big dog, wide in the chest and long in the leg, covered with what must have been white curly fur when he was dry and happy. Now his pelt was all runnels and curds of dripping, clotted gray fur. He staggered up on two legs at the sight of her – at the sight of anything other than the rain – and tried to call to her.

He couldn’t bark. He was too weak. He gave a strangled, whimpering yelp as she passed, and as he turned she saw that one side of his body, from shoulder to thigh, was covered in something thin and flat and shiny – something like a big piece of cellophane, glistening and transparent as a jellyfish. She looked a little closer and it seemed to pulse, like it was beating right along with the poor dog’s heart. But she didn't go to help. She didn't know that dog, and besides it was too late.

In Sylvia's experience, it was always too late.

She stopped at the corner right across from her apartment and watched bits of paper and landscaping tumble down the blacktop, torn to bits in the crosswinds. As she watched, the rainclouds themselves seem to dip lower and lower, swallowing the upper stories of office buildings and the rooftops of three-story homes. Lightning flickered inside those clouds, growling and muttering.

The water in front of her was thick as stew and a sullen gray. She recognized that color. She’d seen it before. She’d seen it the day Chuck Harmon fell down gasping right in front of her. She had known he was having a heart attack right away: his face was slick with sweat, he was clutching at his arm with a hand bent into a scooping, restless claw. He had been the same unhealthy color as that water: thick and gray. But she just stood there and did nothing. Just as she was doing now.

He couldn’t get up without her help. He couldn’t reach the phone. But Sylvia didn’t touch him or comfort him or even speak to him. She just unpacked all the hateful things that she had put away over their twenty-two years of marriage and looked at each and every one of them, very carefully while he gasped and groaned at her feet.

It took her twenty minutes to call the paramedics. Once she called, it took them another ten minutes to get there.

Chuck died in the ambulance on the way to the Borrego Clinic.

Eight point two point two years ago, she told herself as she looked up the street one way and didn’t see any cars, then looked down the other way and saw even less in the gathering darkness. She was tired, and fed up, and still very drunk.

“Serious as a heart attack,” she said to herself, and stepped into the intersection.

The pole that carried the traffic light waggled in the wind like the tail of an angry cat. She could hear it pling and pop as it flexed. She saw a light go on in a house to her right. She heard a yelp! and a what –? And then the light went out abruptly, with a tiny implosive crash! as if the bulb had been shattered.

She passed the halfway point and a stripped-down skeleton of hedgerow blew past her. An instant later a seven-foot length of two-by-four skidded across the water where she had just been walking, as if being pulled along by an invisible string.

She was three steps from the curb when a window-sized sheet of that see-through tissue, the same stuff she’d seen on the dog, cart-wheeled through the air just in front of her. A moment later a second scrap, twice as big, flapped and whickered right behind her, so close it almost caught the edge of her slicker.

She turned to see what could possibly be –

– and a huge piece of it, larger than a bed sheet, leaped out of the wind with its glassy wings wide and wrapped all around her: whick-whick-whick.

In an instant she was enveloped from the crown of her head to her ankles, like double-thick plastic wrap around a leg of lamb. Her arms were pinned tight against her side, and when she tried to raise them, the sheet actually tightened and pulled her legs out from under her. She fell into the roiling water near the curb.

Chuck Harmon’s face was suddenly in front of her. Not the fuzzy, bloated thing she half-remembered when she drank, but full and complete – more vivid and detailed than it had been even in life. She watched it disappear in front of her, dissolving as her breath dissolved.

Sylvia closed her eyes as the last of the moisture was drawn from her body. She felt the wind pushing her up, lifting her away like a leaf in the gale. It was a strangely exhilarating sensation.

It’s done, she thought gratefully. Finally done .

In her last moments on earth, as the wind carried her desiccated corpse into the sky and far away, Sylvia did something she hadn’t done since the day she was married.

She smiled.

Read more about the people – and the creatures – of Dos Hermanos, and the secrets that are hiding in the rain.

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