Author Topic: The Tears of the Raindrop  (Read 3391 times)

Jubal

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The Tears of the Raindrop
« on: July 28, 2011, 12:10:52 PM »
Note; The following account contains one of the few first-hand descriptions the present chronicler has been able to discover of the 2019 English election where the last moderate government was resoundingly defeated, setting the scene for the next fifty years of violence and intimidation. It was transcribed from a vocal recording of a dying leader of the opposing Democratic faction at his death in 2070 after a governmental force destroyed, although with crippling losses, the main remaining Anglesey rebel stronghold, just four months before liberation by the Canadian army. This is the only record surviving the ensuing destruction. No record has been discovered of the speaker’s name.

THE TEARS OF THE RAINDROP

Can you see the marks? Will it be fast? Here in the mud. Lying in the mud. Dying in the mud.
I think I can see the splash of a raindrop through my misted eyes. It’s odd what eyes see in life… But I’ll be beyond it soon. Away. Dead. Gone.

I have tried to be brave, for surely those are the bravest men who know their fight is hopeless, and can see their defeat, and walk with head held high to meet it? Have I done right? Remember me, friends. Remember my story, and walk with your heads held high, and not your hands.

My body shall lie in this room as testament to the evils of men. What has been done cannot be undone; I will never see the light of day again, and nor shall those who I fought for. It would have been easy, I often think to die for the millions – the outcasts, the forgotten ones, all those condemned that day. I didn’t. I struggled. I kicked. I shouted.

And until today, I have lived…


The splash of a raindrop on the windowsill. A pair of trainers lazily lying on a seat. Light shoes, not tough, not walking shoes. A magazine (Was it news? Science? My memory is fading with my eyes). Yes – there was a magazine on the table – just next to the TV. December 8, 2019. A date I’ve remembered for fifty-one years and but for this record, will go with me to my grave. I’ve walked a long road since then. I’ve needed tougher shoes.

The flat wasn’t big, and it seemed all the smaller since the three (was it only ever three?) yes, just the three of us lived there. I owned the flat: Chris worked in a shop below, and Jess had an office down the road. Three of us. Chris’s grandparents had been Iranian (that was before New Persia was formed), and he was a joker, a lanky, capering clown of a man who was almost unsettlingly humorous, and since we had met, one day on a train station waiting to go to Cambridge, he had been my friend. Jessica was quiet, and pale, and clever and almost unthinkingly kind and she walked with a dance-step, and played an old violin when she felt sad.
I don’t remember what was for supper that night, or even whether or not we ate anything; I was just fixated on the TV.

Chris walked in late after work, drawn and wan, his sallow face pale and peaky. Perhaps he knew already. His eyes, dark and shadowy, anxious eyes, they said so.
We sat down and watched the TV. I am an Atheist, and as I saw the flickering pixels, drilling holes into my eyes, I knew I was right. How could this have happened? The flickering pixels danced like delighted devils, hammering the iron nails of hatred again and again, the bolts ever riveting my disbelieving eyes harder and closer and tighter to the screen.

Cheering crowds. I think that was what hit me the hardest. Cheering for death. Cheering for hatred. When I was younger, I thought I knew what people were like. I had been wrong, and this – this was wrong, wrong, wrong… (For what had the people condemned at the ballot box done wrong? They had committed no crime, angered nobody, attacked nobody – but they were not the same, not quite the same. It was not even that they were foreign – maybe ten generations ago an ancestor or two had been – and after December 3, 2019, they were the lost and cursed and damned.)

I looked at Chris. His eyes were wide, and not with academic interest or casual surprise. Not with anxiety, not even with fear. This was deeper, this was more violent, an emotion suppressed in man’s past that had come back in all its fully frightening glory. This was terror. Primal, gut-ripping, petrifying, fight or flight, rat-eat-rat terror. His fingernails gouged into the ageing plastic of the chair, and his shoes flicked jerkily back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... Man is an animal after all; and Chris had found that he still had his predators.

The door creaked gently open, and a light, nervous step was gingerly taken into the room. Chris leapt up, eyes like a slavering wild horse; the slow, teetering splash of his coffee on the floor went almost unnoticed. The slender black shoe was followed, though, by Jess. Looking fatigued and pained, she had rims of crumpled red silk around her tired eyes.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget anything about Jessica’s eyes: they could pierce and penetrate, extracting everything she wanted from you at a whim; or soften gently, and smile brighter than the sun in springtime; or they could spring up like a bubbling brook and dance like damselflies over a sparkling pool.
Now, though, they were drained, like once-shiny fruit that had first fallen in the wind and then shriveled up and dried, leaving a sad, depleted pit where once had been the heart of life. And she knew too.

Her gaze lingered upon Chris for a second, just a second, and then she stumbled blindly across the room. What could they say to each other? How could they end what had started? She couldn’t look at him. Not now.

Wringing the drips from the cascade of night-black gossamer that tumbled from her head over her shoulders, she folded up like a deckchair in a storm, collapsing into a chair. Raindrops were still slowly poking on the tips of her scarf and then hurtling recklessly down, one by one, drop by drop, splashing on the floor. Jess hadn’t even shut the door.
As I staggered onto my feet to go and push the door closed again, a flash of bright light startled me through the window. A firework. Just a firework, I assured myself. Then even that hit me, another hurtling thud into the depths of my gut. Fireworks? Now? Had people dwindled, had they fallen this far?
In the blackness and rain outside, fire met water, and hell danced around us, and Lucifer was laughing.


I shut the door.
   

I knew it would not stay shut for long, though…

It was a long night, and it was the last long night of a mad, dying world, or so it seemed to the three forgotten souls in that flat fifty years ago. Shouts and the plod, plod, plod of clumping, tramping, stamping feet outside filled our skittish, nervous minds, and we quivered as if we were tiny, feeble mice that had looked out to see the wide world and found it was too big and too harsh and too cruel for us to live in.

Boots, heavy boots, hard boots, the boots of pain, boots were clattering down the street. One house, then another – then another and the next, the flashlights revealing the hidden few, bringing them out into a light, a searing, searching light, that was harsher and crueler yet than the one they had hidden themselves away from.
We knew the door would not say shut for long, but the knock, harsh and cold, surprised us all the same.

“God”, moaned Jess, her eyes clamped tight. “God, god, god.” She stepped up took one last look at Chris, and then hurried into the bathroom, retching violently. She knew.

Chris looked at me. He knew. I looked at Chris. I knew. He was a dead man walking, and his eyes knew. They couldn’t see me any more, emotion dying under the burden of what we knew.

“Chris,” I started, hesitantly.

A second tap, cold and clear, on the door.

“Say no more,” he sighed, a chesty sigh that poured away life along with the air from his lungs. “Do not… do not put yourself in danger. Don’t be seen to be helping a man like me.” He was world-weary and life-sick, but I knew I had to say something. For the knock rang out again.

“Hello? Anyone in?” a man’s voice barked from outside, each syllable gruff and grating, like the growl of an angry, vicious terrier waiting and ready to leap, pounce, bite, and kill.

“A man like you? Of a race whose fathers built civilization? Of a race whose fathers built the greatest monuments of antiquity? Of a race whose sons have included some of the greatest scholars of their ages? Chris, you have no obligation to do anything. You still have rights, there are still laws…” My voice trailed off. There is only so much a man can lie to himself.


And the fourth knock was harder, harsher still.

“Open up in there! Search order!”

Chris started towards the door, but I started after him.

“Don’t give up!” I implored, a desperate growl harshly ripping through my voice. “The world has not ended…”

Chris looked at me with dead stone-eyes once more. For the last time.

“My world has ended.”


He opened the door.


I think I was still standing there, rocking slightly on my feet to the rhythm of my beating heart (still beating?), when Jess emerged ten minutes later she looked sick and pale, and her eyes darted left and right, up and down, searching for a man who wasn’t there. My eyes slid around, trying to find a way to sidle out, to not have to bear witness to what was before me, but to no avail. Jess looked straight at me then, with eyes that still sear into my mind on dark or restless nights.

“Has… Has he..?” was all she managed to croak.

Biting my lip so hard it began, eventually, to seep blood out and leak it over my lips, I nodded, slowly.

Jess ran out onto the balcony of the flat, screaming wildly into the sunrise, a death scream to chill the soul and stop the heart. I followed her, and then just stood there and watched as she hung her head over the railing, then stood and stared into the middle distance. As I walked up to put a feeble, late arm around her shoulders, she turned her face upwards to the morning clouds. Facing up to the sky, Jess crumpled her face into a knot, wringing the memories out one by one by one by one by one by painful one…

And the last thing I remember is looking down, and seeing the splash of a teardrop as it tumbled to the floor.

Logged to server on January 4, 2092
« Last Edit: July 28, 2011, 12:15:23 PM by Jubal »
The duke, the wanderer, the philosopher, the mariner, the warrior, the strategist, the storyteller, the wizard, the wayfarer...

Scarlet

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Re: The Tears of the Raindrop
« Reply #1 on: June 09, 2013, 02:22:46 PM »
It really is brilliant, Jubal.
like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it for ever.

gellthîr i melethron nîn

nínim in menil

Pentagathus

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Re: The Tears of the Raindrop
« Reply #2 on: June 09, 2013, 02:40:03 PM »
Cheery stuff.
But yes, that is very good.

Clockwork

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Re: The Tears of the Raindrop
« Reply #3 on: June 09, 2013, 03:00:43 PM »
Beautiful story, crafted as a true wordsmith Jubal.
Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense.