It’s a rainy night, and the windowsill flowers are pink.

“It’s really coming down,” the boy mutters. “Mom, have you seen it? It’s really coming down out there. Never seen it like this before.”
“Yes, honey, I can see it. Sure is something,” she says, cleaning dishes. “Have you told your father? Is your father seeing it?”
“Dad! Dad, look outside! You’re gonna want to. It’s never rained like this before,” he yells upward, “not that I’ve seen, at least.”
Nobody responds. He jumps off the couch and onto the stairs, skipping atop each step.
“Dad,” the boy says, knocking loudly, “have you looked out the window? It’s raining something awful outside. Mom thinks so too. You oughta see it.”
There’s a short pause.
“Yeah, buddy, I see it,” his father says.
“Really something, huh?”
“Cats and dogs.”
The boy stands there for a short while. He stares up at the door’s white grain, and feels a softness to his face. He shoots back down the stairs.
He grabs a pair of reading glasses off the coffee table, and sits at the window with his arms around his knees. His mother smokes a cigarette over the kitchen sink.
“What’d he say?” she asks, reaching for a glass.
“He said ‘cats and dogs’.”
“Cats and dogs. That’s a good one.”
The boy settles the plastic stems over his ears, and squints into the rain. Most of what he can see is a sort of dark green, but the streetlights are shining yellow. The spattering has a mistiness to it. There are some people out there now, a couple, holding a short umbrella over their heads. He’s got his arm around her, she’s holding her elbows and looking at her shoes. The boy can’t tell how tall they are. The rain seems closer to floating than falling, but he can hear it coming down.
He sits quietly for a moment, then runs upstairs to his room. Scotch tape curls off the corners of his posters. He crawls under the bunk to get at his magazine, and reads through to the back cover. He drops his goldfish a few pellets, humming the chorus of a song, and walks toward the stairs.
“Have you fixed the mailbox yet?” his mother calls through the railing. “Could be difficult in this weather.”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, Anthony, take those off,” she says, facing him. “They’re fragile you know, you’ll break them. Either that or your eyes’ll rot.”
“I only had them for a second,” the boy says. “Dad won’t even use ‘em till he goes to bed.”
“You’ll put them back, or I’ll start counting, I swear.”
He continues down the steps and lays the glasses on the table, crossing the stems in a diagonal ‘X.’ It’s only now that he notices their pattern: a black thread swirling through baby blue. He grabs a juicebox off the counter and looks towards the window. His mother, sitting in her usual green armchair, leans her cigarette over the chair’s edge.
“How was school?” she asks.
“Good. Ms. Parr came back from leave.”
“I saw the drawing you left in the foyer, the one of the lion,” she says. “Very nice. What do you call him?”
“Hasn’t got a name,” he says.
“No?”
The boy raises his juice for a sip, and looks out at the walkways and doors. The couple from before have disappeared past the road’s curve. “Maybe he used to, but he hasn’t anymore,” he says. “Guess he forgot.”
“Well I think that’s pretty sad, don’t you?”
“His mane was too big for the page, so I only drew part of it.”
“I saw that. It was a very big mane,” she says.
He glances over to see her lips in vague smile that curls faintly at its ends. She takes another smoke.
“I was thinking melon and whipped cream for dessert,” she says. “How’s that sound?”
“Good to me,” the boy says.
Across the street and two houses to the left, he sees a man walk out his front door and into a brown sedan. It drives off with its lights gilding the mist. He finishes his juicebox and settles it onto the piano, straw chewed and all, then moves to the back room. At times, the spattering outside is almost rhythmic.
He turns on the television, flips channels for a bit, and shuts it off. He goes over to the piano to practice his scales. By the third or fourth play over, his fingers start to slip off the keys and skid around. He stops after a while, and looks back at the window. The mist looks like an old photograph. He glances over each of the sheet’s dots and stems, and practices them again.
“Jerry! Dessert’s ready!” he hears from the kitchen, then, through the ceiling: “Coming.”
His father walks down the steps and toward the table, calling the boy in from the back room, and proceeds to eat his melon with both utensils. The boy takes a seat and looks at his bowl. He squeezes in some extra swirls of cream.
“Not too much, honey,” his mother says, checking the corner drawer for a spoon. He stops after three bursts, and turns his head to the kitchen window.
“I should probably grab some stationery from the office after this,” his father says. His voice is soft.
“We’ve got plenty here, I think,” she says. “Just in the desk downstairs.”
The boy leans his cheek on his palm, and digs for a spoonful of cream. It melts in this mouth.
“It’s fine, I wanted to go for a walk anyway.”
“Well, there’s no need,” she says.
“I can borrow an umbrella from the Garrisons.”
The boy stares out at the mailboxes, sidewalks, gardens, and puddles. He plucks at a piece of melon with his fingers, and watches his father chew. He watches as the edges of his father’s teeth crunch, and as the wrinkles around his father’s mouth furl and unfurl. The boy wonders if he looks like this when he chews. He looks down at his bowl, then back up, and reaches for a toothpick from the table’s centre. His mother, setting her napkin over her lap, smiles at him like she had in the living room. He eats quietly and rests his elbows on his knees.
After dessert, someone turns the radio on. His father walks upstairs with the coffee table glasses between his fingers, while his mother reads a novel in her armchair. The boy sits on the kitchen counter, dangling his feet over the floor, sipping from a cold juicebox. The radio broadcasts jazz piano under soft static. The flowers on the windowsill are perfectly pink, and evenly still.
He lands a short jump from the counter, throws his empty box in the garbage, and opens a few drawers and closes them again. The rain falls past the window. It’s falling so hard he can hear it. He walks over to the backdoor screen to look out. He can see it falling into the grass. His mother’s eyes are fixed to the threadbare fold of her paperback, her right arm hanging off the fabric curve. The kitchen tiles are lit bright.
He grasps softly onto the knob, turns it, and walks himself through. He steps into the small cement patio under the roof’s overhang. A dark yellow seeps from the open screen. There’s a wooden chair and broken ottoman on the cement, while the rest of the yard is wet, un-groomed grass. The rain’s falling three feet in front of him, and not an inch closer, as if perpetually walled.
The wind blows harshly through his hair. The wind and the spattering have merged into a singular, surrounding schhh, and it’s all that he can hear. He looks out at the rain. He can see the toolshed, lawn mower, doghouse, and fence; the clouds in the sky and the lights in the distance. The raindrops spatter and spit behind a tint of grey. The tint is almost warm. The noise sustains through the rain and over the roof. Everything being loud isn’t so different from everything being silent, he notices. The grass is weedy and uneven, thick and soft.
He steps forward with the heel of his foot, follows with its toes, then repeats with the left. His nose sniffles. The mist slips over his feet like the shallow chill of a tide. He folds the joints of his fingers inward and out, then carries his hand toward the rain.
From here, the drops fall lucidly. They are short and fast.
He feels it first on his nails, then his knuckles, then the back of his palm; heavy and fast and piercing into the seams of his skin. He can feel it on his wrist, on the curve of his thumb. It’s cold and wet. He can see it blowing diagonally with the wind. He can feel it in his hand, fingers, and skin, falling with speed. He can hear a voice behind him from a screeching door. The voice is calling his name. He can see the rain in the distance over the fractured clouds and town lights. The clouds stretch out to the horizon. The drops falling onto him are the same ones from out there. He can feel them in his skin. They are above him and below. They are falling into the grass. They are cold and wet and fast and short. He can feel them.
He stands there, hair blowing, knees shivering, the wind and rain all around him and within, hand held out, before it all. He stands just like this.