One Hundred Days of Rain Read Online Free PDF

skim-milk wrist held to its forehead, collapses on the divan. Rain seems not to be long for this world.
    Outside the cars swish on by, ignoring rain, the possibility of it, the outside world. Who cares! Rain has nothing on them. Rain can’t get in behind these sealed windows. Rain is barely there, not worth noticing, another dismissable part of the world nobody quite inhabits anymore.
    Rain’s days are numbered, it seems. The way rain does things is not the way things are done, not any longer. Rain doesn’t have any interface, it isn’t mediated. It lies there shuddering. Not very long now, rain murmurs quietly to itself.

25.
    In Victoria overnight to attend a conference, she emerges onto wet streets in the morning. There is no sign of rain. The city’s ordinary residents seem unastonished by this. So far as she can tell their normal temper, a mild ever-present sweetness, remains unchanged. They live in a slower simpler town. Not so much of this hurry hurry and let’s go. Everyone has umbrellas and hats at the ready of course, that’s the kind of place it is. But there’s no need. Rain has vanished from above the quiet city, leaving only the evidence of its passage: a stain, to fade in turn.
    A different kind of wet awaits as the ferry pulls itself towards Vancouver. Another ship draws close, displaying an enormous confidence. Giant and balletic, the white boats pivot around an invisible central axis, toot their mournful whistles one to the other. This is the narrowest part of the passage, here between these rocky islands with their houses levered out from the slope, above the meagre skirts of sands.
    Ahead rain gathers on the slopes of the nearer islands. You can’t see rain until you draw closer, into its midst. The clouds thicken into a white concentration in the folds of the hills rising sternly in their turn from the mist.
    In Vancouver the sun is a sudden shining, a punchline. She turns her face up to it: brevity, and the bright quaver of the light.

26.
    Heading out into the shrouded afternoon rain has obliterated all else. Heavy, wet drops cover the known world. They are splashing like a curtain wrapped around her as she bicycles with her head down.
    In a few seconds she feels the wetness trickling into her shoes. Her face all slick. Plastered to her is the hair that creeps out from under her helmet. She thinks she can feel rain working its way into the vents above her head. Rain is coldly furious. It finds the hidden ways inside coat & covering, seeping through to the tender skin of her neck. Her scalp.
    She arrives at the office drenched. Her tights heavy at their bottoms with trapped moisture. She takes off her soaked shoes under the table where nobody can see. Her dripping black overcoat. There is nowhere to hang it so she settles for the back of her chair. The arms of the silk shantung jacket she picked out this morning before school are bleeding at the insides of the elbows. Dusty rose blooming a shocked pink. She takes that off too – she has to – and hangs it discreetly from her chair’s arm. The chill settles in. This is what is worst about rain: the getting inside, the wet left on her. She is stained by her journey, short as it was: the marks of passage are upon her. It is all very well to say that she will dry but what nobody counts are these silent dripping hours in between, and the shiver. Rain has ruined her.

27.
    In the years she and M lived together their duplex was on the southern edge of the city. She wrote grants for the arts consortium that rented out space from the university. Working mostly at her computer. Occasional days she visited.
    She and M lived at the top of a hill. You could see weather coming, clouds in the far sky or wisping round the mountains, and the brown smudge that blurred the hills across the way. On a bicycle you were in it for the long haul, unless she called on M’s near-vintage Land Rover. It looked all right that day.