The tale of the rainy day: Page three
Before responding, the other man walks away from the window and begins to pace the length of the darkening room. Lightening occasionally illuminates the room with a flash, causing the mans eyes to look slightly haunted. The other watches silently from his chair. Finally, the man stops pacing and sits back down in his own chair. Turning to face him again he says:
“He snapped. I will never forget the day that it happened either. We lived in a small town so of course it was in the paper. Everybody talked about it. One day I saw him in the hallway. It was raining outside and we were getting ready to go home. He had been walking around school that day in a kind of trance, ignoring the harassment of the other kids. I stopped at his locker and tapped him on the shoulder. Normally he would have jumped like a scared mouse, but not this time. Instead, he just kept putting his raincoat on. I asked him if everything was ok. He slowly turned to me and I saw his eyes. They looked dead. His buckteeth come out in a smile so forced that under any other circumstances it would have looked funny, but not this time. I'm just fine, EVERYTHING is just fine he says to me. He wouldn’t say another word to me and so I went home.
The next day it was raining even harder, just like it is today. Maybe that is why I can’t get it out of my mind, I don’t know.”
With a deep sigh, the man looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes. After a few moments he gets up and walks back to the window. With his head leaning against the cold glass he continues in a deeply pained voice as if on the verge of tears.
“He never showed up for school that day. For some reason I was very bothered by this, having seen him the day before. I had this feeling of foreboding unlike anything I had ever felt before. It was eerie. None of the other kids even noticed his absence. I went through that whole school day with that eerie feeling, and as I walked home in the pouring rain that feeling only got stronger.
He lived a few blocks closer to the school than I did. I always went past his house on the way home. As I approached his house I saw something very unusual for our little town. There were police cars with lights flashing; an ambulance was parked on his front yard. Its lights were flashing. I honestly felt like the world suddenly stopped when I saw it happen…”
“Saw what happen?” asked the other man as he gripped the arms of his chair tightly.
-John Alexander (aka SirJohn)
