as the gentle rain from heaven
At night she dreams of rain falling heavily from three different skies, each one of them home. The first is the barest memory, a small glimmer in her mind of what she thinks she may remember, tied together with bits and pieces of someone else’s memories and the things she’s seen in films.

Just clouds, and rain, and cold.


The second is different; sun shining as the rain pours down, sky gone golden, streaks of yellow backlit against bright orange. Beautiful, but threatening. The danger there was worse than the dark of a thunderstorm, so deceivingly like the simplicity of a sunshower. The wind howls there as the rain drips down from the golden sky, the roar in the air so like an oncoming train, announcing the arrival of the funnel cloud set to sweep them all away.

The last is grey, stormclouds over city streets, brick bungalows and broken pavement. Flashing lights burn into the night, traffic horns baying at the moon while a thousand burning headlights blink in the downpour. The sky has no color, only sheeted texture of cloud upon cloud blotting out the sun and whatever hints of blue might hide behind. The water seems grey, puddling in the streets and dripping from pipes and gutters, trash-choked sewers spewing out torrents they are unable to hold.

And yet it is bright and alive and home, another home to hold dear, even as the years pass and the burnished desert becomes more the picture of home than the bustle of the gleaming city on the lake.

At night she dreams of faces. None the same, though some strikingly alike. Drifting past and drifting into one another, never staying long.
Only long enough to love.
Only love enough to hurt.
Only hurt enough gut her when they leave.

They have no order; the flit in and out of her dreams, over and over, throughout the night, as though some beacon in her mind pulls them close and ever closer, refusing to let them be. Refusing to let them go.

Lately now, a brother. Large dark eyes, like hers but not the same. Dead now. Gone far too long to make her dreams his nightly haunt, and yet still he appears and reappears so often. Sometimes in the darkness of her mind’s eye, she can see him only as she was made to see him, dead and broken and corrupted by the hand of hell itself, played before her like a puppet. Sometimes.

Tonight he is different than that. Himself. Smiling. The curve of a smile bringing to mind another, the face melting into someone else’s, til another of the dearly departed smiles at her. The smile soon fades, and he shakes his head, reaching up with a scarred hand to brush sawdust from his dark hair. He frowns, disappointed. He doesn’t speak, because the voice her mind could conjure wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be the same. But she knows that look, that frown, and she tries to explain, but she can’t find her own voice to speak, her body broken and drifted into something incorporeal, there but not there, as the images drift past her.

The sky brightens; she is home again, the second sky, though the threat has subsided and the wind no longer howls. The breeze is softer now, warm, the rain still showering down but lightly now, soft and almost welcoming.

Unseen the darkness comes, brought by the one she still most fears. It drips into her world with a malevolent grace, like so many drops of ebony ink falling and spreading their whispering tendrils through a world made of cool, clear water. Everything darkens, that blackness spreading and infecting the very air around her.

She is home now, the solid home of wood and plaster and stone sunken into the desert floor. A sprawling dusky blue house, so out of place and yet so at home along the lonely desert road. She is in her room, in her bed in the twilight, and she sees a door that isn’t there. The wood is old and blackened as though by fire, pulsing and groaning as though something behind is trying to push through. A brass keyhole gleams, something silvery and evil shining behind, hoping to pry its way back.

A shimmer of disconnected particles, and she crouches and peers through the keyhole; she sees only herself, some ink-eyed bastardization of her own soul, crouched over death and glaring back at her. She gasps, pulls away and pulls herself apart again into nothingness, drifting in the rain that begins to fall from the ceiling, drowning the room. The door still heaves, but the keyhole has gone dark, and she knows what lurks behind is not the scene she had witnessed but something darker, something more familiar.

The door pulses and she wills it away, afraid it might burst.

At night she dreams of her mother, the small wasted woman in the hospital bed, limp strands of blonde hair spread on her pillow as she glares with accusing eyes. Blaming, hating, all your fault. The blonde goes lighter, shorter, and stands there a warlock with a smirk and a dark cloud around him. Pulled together again she feels small, something protected, a surrogate for another, and she forces that grip again. That way madness lies… shun that, no more of that.

At night the world around her fights, but she only drifts and cries and feels the quiet rain falling from home-skies. The others walk in the night, search for answers and for cures, but she only lets it all fall away from her.

At night, Emmy sleeps. At night, she dreams of rain.