Hello friends. I've written this story for the most recent fiction prompt from The Ink Well, Childhood Summers. If you love fiction, I invite you to check out our community!
Blame the Rain
Image source: Pixabay
Rainy summer days were dull days. Horrid days. The sort that a nine year-old child like Georgie was bound to squander looking out the windows with rain drizzling down the panes like the pee water of angels. And on such days he was far more likely than not to get into trouble.
Georgie was mad. Lucinda had bumped his tower of Legos, and it was the biggest one he had ever made — higher than the fireplace mantle. Tall as the height of the big view windows looking out on the garden. The whole thing had come crashing down. Of course he had given her a punch on the arm. Of course she had screamed. Of course he was sent to his room and was told he must stay until he was ready to sincerely apologize, which of course he wasn’t. It wouldn’t have happened if not for the rain. He would have been outdoors, playing soccer in the vacant lot with Tommy or riding his bike, or....
Somewhere down the hall a phone rang. Then he heard his father speaking, and imagined him with his headset on, pacing officiously as he had been doing since the start of the pandemic when he stopped going to the office. “No, it’s about perception,” his father was saying. “If it’s not paying off, if we’re not seeing results, then go back to the creative team and tell them it’s not working, Franklin.”
Georgie imagined himself as an important business man. He put the headset on from his computer gaming set, which he was not allowed to play with today, and marched around the room with his arms crossed, speaking in a commanding tone to someone named Franklin. A minion. A sniveling, useless worker who did not understand about results. “We must see results, Franklin!”
But he was soon bored of that, and so he spent time lying on his bed looking at the wall paneling, which had often provided amusement in his most painfully bored moments. There were swirls in the fake wood panels that looked like eyes — big staring eyes, small beady eyes, and the wide open startled eyes of someone who has seen a ghost. Though they had frightened him and given him nightmares as a young child of five or six, he now saw them as allies, and they variously looked grim and angry, lonely and sad, or completely disgusted, depending on his mood. He liked to imagine they were people caught within the walls, trapped there in some kind of construction accident, and calling helplessly for their freedom.
His father’s conversation was over now, and he heard his mother calling out in the hallway that she was going to the store for something for dinner, and Georgie knew this meant she had forgotten him completely and a feeling of abandonment gripped him like a terrible vice. He remembered a time when he and Lucinda left their dog, Midge, in a sit-stay outside the Quick Mart. After buying candy bars, they went out by a different exit than the one they had entered, and it wasn’t until they got home that they realized she was still sitting outside the Quick Mart, waiting. This was just like that. Except that they had cried over Midge when they returned and found her waiting by the door where they had left her, so loyal and patient.
Georgie was certain, in his swamp of self-pity, that no one cared for him at all anymore. Perhaps they would leave him here until he was a very old man, forgetting what he had done wrong so many years ago.
There was a tenuous knock at the door, and then he heard Lucinda’s voice. “Are you ready to apologize, brat?”
“No. Go away.” He knew Lucinda was bored too, and the only reason she wanted his apology was so they could build a fort, which they had always loved to do on rainy days. But he wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction. At the very least, she was going to have to work for it.
“Come on," she said. "Why are you so mean?”
“You’re the one who ruined my tower. I worked on that for days, you know. Now go away.”
As much as he was enjoying his misery, he hoped she would ask one more time, so he could reluctantly, and in a highly annoyed tone, acquiesce to her demands. A fort or a board game would be infinitely better than this. But instead Lucinda said, “You’re a pimple-faced butt head!” He heard her feet padding away down the hall, and then the door to her room slammed shut.
“Hey, shush!” his father said from his office at the end of the hall. Then his door clicked shut as well.
“That does it,” he thought. He needed to get out of this room. It wasn’t fair. Lucinda had started this whole thing. His tower had been destroyed in the process, and yet he was being punished — treated like a prisoner in his own home.
In the next moment an idea came to him. A truly stupendous one. A brilliant idea for revenge. Lucinda had it coming.
He stuffed some pillows under his blanket to make it look as though he was in bed sleeping, and he made sure it looked just like a figure under the covers, bent at the knees and so on, and the covers not too neat. Then he slipped out the door of his room, shut the door quietly and tiptoed partway down the hall.
There, to his perennial wonderment, was a laundry chute. This fascinating contraption, with a trap door that looked just like a small cupboard, was positioned at the center of the hall for all the family to use to quickly send their dirty laundry to the basement for washing. How many times throughout his childhood had he imagined this chute as the doorway to a different dimension, or the passageway of goblins, or an escape route from slave owners or Nazis… and so many other things? Though he had never tried it, he had also imagined, with a thrilling terror, the idea of sliding down it and landing softly in a basket of laundry below.
Today, however, he had other plans. With his mother out on an errand and his father busy in his closed office, he had this one chance. It just so happened that the bedroom closest to the laundry chute was Lucinda’s. It was also true that the house was old and that it rattled in the wind and sounds could carry throughout the house through pipes and vents. Their father was always threatening to tear the whole thing down and rebuild. Or perhaps hire a contractor who could bolster up the place and bring it up to today’s standards and codes. But none of these things had come to pass.
Georgie was giddy with excitement about his agenda. He had judged the size of the chute against his own size, and whereas in his younger days he would have just fallen straight through, he knew now that he could wedge himself in just so, perhaps due to his fondness for hamburgers and pizza, and remain held in place by the snug fit against the sides. He glanced down the hallway, opened the trap door, and crawled carefully inside, where he pressed himself against the sides of the chute. Finally, he pulled the door shut, though he couldn’t quite close it all the way without pinching his fingers.
And then he enacted the next phase of his plan, which was to create small sounds, creepy sounds, which grew in intensity while his sister, presumably caught up in a book or some homework in her room, would have a dawning awareness of the haunting noises penetrating the walls.
He tapped against the metal sides with his index finger, creating a splendid echoing tik tik tik. Then he made the sound of the wind that sometimes whipped through the vents of the house like evil spirits, but raising it an octave to sound unnatural and wrong. He was in a bit of a sweat, now, due to his excitement and the warmth of the close quarters, but he kept on. Haunting laughter came next, low and guttural and so delightful in its fearsome sound that he nearly frightened himself.
“Dad? What is that?”
It was working! Lucinda had stepped out of her room into the hallway and was calling out in distress. Georgie paused to hear the interchange.
He heard the door to his father’s office open. “Honey, I’m sorry but I’m quite busy. It’s just the wind and rain.” The sound of the door shutting at the end of the hall provided closure to his father’s involvement.
Georgie was now feeling very hot and slick with sweat in his close hiding place. But again he made the sound of a ghostly wind, eerily rising to a crescendo, followed by the hideously evil laugh.
Footsteps ran down the hall past the laundry chute. He heard his own bedroom door open and Lucinda crying, “Georgie, come quick! Wake up, you slug! We’re being haunted!” And this was so satisfying that Georgie nearly laughed his normal laugh. Instead, he clasped a sweaty hand over his mouth and tried to hang on. It occurred to him that he had not actually determined a course of action to get back out of the chute, and his discomfort was mounting.
What happened next did not match his expectations at all. He could see it all in his mind’s eye. Instead of finding him asleep and giving up on him, Lucinda pounced on his carefully constructed form in the bed. “I said wake up!” Here is where his plan fell apart. Discovering pillows where Georgie ought to be, Lucinda then marched back out of his room and spied the not-quite-closed laundry chute door. And in the next instant there she was, her face filling the opening, angrier than he had ever seen her.
A hand came down, and was placed firmly on his head where it gave a shove with just the right force so that his sweat-slick body released its friction against the sides of the chute with a hideous slippery squeal, and he fell through. The following moments occurred in slow motion, with every bit of the fall highlighted in his mind in all of its terror and cruelty. It seemed he fell for a very long time, with his entire life and all of its injustices flashing by, before he landed in a broken heap in a laundry basket that was only partly full and could therefore not cushion his fall. And he began to yell.
Much later that night, after a rather glorious ambulance ride, the pronouncement of a broken leg and some bruising, followed by installation of a luminous yellow cast that was signed with hearts and flowers by his medical staff, Georgie returned home. There was a family conference, over cake and ice cream, which involved a somewhat stern talk about naughtiness and mutual respect from their parents, though they clearly hadn’t the heart to be angry. And their love for both children was obvious in their eyes, and in the solicitous way they offered second helpings, as if making up for their own lack of parental stewardship when it mattered most. Lucinda, Georgie saw, had been chastened, as her eyes were still red from crying.
“Well how about that,” Georgie heard his inner voice say. “She thought she killed me.”
This, he knew, was his greatest moment, forever sealed in the family lore, and it was unlikely any future exploits could match this feeling of glory. And it was all on account of the rain.