photo prompt story: After the last long rain
All the greens went gray. It was that way in every deep monsoon. All the greens faded and darkened until very
little green really remains in the vines and trees that are usually so vividly green that my mother joked
our grove is stealing color from other trees in the world right through the soil. The almost lime green of
the new growth dims to almost sage. The bright grass and forest greens of the older trees literally wash
down into a sort of dingy shadow of their former selves. And the usually dark almost pine colored vines
that surround our home become almost black in the over-wet.
Now, I know it was a trick of the light. And maybe even a trick of my own heart, since the monsoon also brings the Danger, that unknown lurker who hides in those same beautiful woods and makes wandering people appear to have drowned without water in their lungs after carrying them miles from wherever it snatched them up. The Danger that I have feared since I was a very young girl. My mother says I am foolish, that the children’s story is made to keep children from wandering away and being swept away by tiny fingers of water in the mangrove that become rushing rivers during the monsoon and then quickly shrink back later.
She’s right that I’m foolish, just not in the way she thinks. I’m going to kill the Danger. I’ve known I was going to kill it since it took my brother. She thinks my foolishness is in believing a child's story told to me almost from infancy killed my brother. I know my foolishness is that when I saw that thing and it looked at me I have been able to see it out there in the sages and grays and blacks of my usually welcoming green forests. It doesn’t seem to know that I can see it now, how it lurks and turns into a rounder lump of shadow before moving on. I’m sure it doesn’t or it would hide better in those shadows.
Today I stood at the end of our drive in the pouring rain letting it soak me through to my bones and I watched. And I remembered.
Tali, Kaitali was his given name, and my brother Bok were in the field between our home and the mangrove and a sudden gust of wind ripped Tali’s cherished Army hat off and it flew straight into the darkest shadow in the trees. I wasn’t supposed to be outside, I was too young. My brother Bok was 13, old enough to be trusted not to go into the trees. At just eight, my mother didn’t trust me. It might be safer to say that at any age my mother does not trust me. I’m 12 now and she still watches me like I might vanish into the dark of the mangrove or down a winding path and never return.
I saw when Tali bolted straight into the mangrove without even a look back. And I saw as Bok looked over his shoulder for less than a second before he ran fast and already falling behind Tali, also into the trees. I didn’t even have to think. I ran. I was farthest behind and smallest. And they didn’t know I was here, so I could lose them fast in the darkness of the overhanging trees. I could hear Bok chiding Tali and trying to get him to come back into the light. Trying to find his friend already lost to the darkness. If he heard me squelching in the mangrove he didn’t say. The saltwater and dead things make the mud soft all year, in the monsoon season it can be knee deep on adult men and can trap people. I think I sank less deep because I wore Bok’s old sandals and weighed almost nothing, so they were like planks supporting me on the top of the mud.
Bok turned scared eyes at me and said, “He was right here and the shadow ate him.” He flapped Tali’s beloved hat, now covered in mud.
“The Danger?” I whispered it, even then unafraid to speak it's name aloud.
He huffed and rolled his eyes. “No. There is no such thing as the Danger. You never listen to mom, do you?” He turned back and I thought he looked like when he was lying. Jaw too set, eyes not willing to meet any other eyes, mouth just a little sad at the corners.
“Kaitali?” He called into the shadows. We were about as far into the mangrove as we could usually go, and I could hear the rushing water just ahead. There is usually a little finger of river that leads down from the high mountain in the center of our island and out to sea right through the heart of this mangrove. That monsoon season it ran the highest it has run since our mother was a child.
I was scanning and added my voice to the search, calling Tali and moving just to the right and deeper into the darkness where I thought I could see something.
I don’t know if I was already seeing it or not. I don’t remember a clear image of the horned dog-like thing until it leaped out and grabbed Bok and I could see the dim yellow-green eyes looking at me. I feel more like I just guessed and got it right. Bok didn’t follow me safely sideways. My mom says that’s how the water’s edge stole him away. I stopped trying to tell her I saw the Danger leap on him from almost right where I was standing and just scoop him up in it’s big gaping mouth and turn and look at me and then bounded away straight into the water. Bok didn’t make a sound. He was just gone.
Heart pounding and my pee burning my legs, I sneaked back to where Bok had dropped Tali’s hat and snatching it up I turned and I ran. I didn’t follow my brother, the Danger had gone straight to the river that was now a raging churning whitecapped deathtrap and I knew I couldn’t go there. I ran and my mother says I made no sense. I was talking about the Danger and the dog and about Tali and Bok and yellow-green eyes and then I just passed out.
They found Bok almost seven kilometers away in a ditch in a village up the coast after the monsoon season ended when the waters started to recede and our island had reclaimed her glorious green from the grays of drowning standing on flat ground. There was no water in Bok’s lungs. His body was badly mangled and he suffocated but did not drown. His bones were crushed, they said. Like something heavy had fallen on him. Or chewed on him, I'd thought then and every other time I have remembered that fact since.
In the years between that rainy season and this one I have stood here, right where I am. Tali’s hat on my head and I have watched. The first thing I realized is that the Danger seems to hunt along the coast and must walk all the way around the island. I did it once with my brother and our father before he died at sea. On our island we mostly all die in the sea. My mother says it is just The Way. He died the year before Bok was taken by the Danger.
We were on my father’s motorbike, Bok and me all cramped up in the side car that usually had groceries or boxes or a little bit of all of it mixed together because our father delivered the mail and also delivered whatever was in town that needed to come back to the residents of our little village. Father said we would have an adventure that morning and we sure did. All the way around the island that we call home. It took us from breakfast until lunch to make the whole circle, and we used roads and were on a motorcycle. He showed us the overlook where he took the ferry each morning to get all the things he would deliver each afternoon, and he showed us the edge of the mangrove, and the neighboring village where my brother’s body would be found in a hollow round depression on the side of a ditch. We saw the mountain from the back side where no one lives because the lava flow made it dangerous to build, and because we don’t live over our dead and all of the villages used to be on that side until the volcano ate them all before it died and became just a mountain.
I also learned that the Danger can see far. It has seen me here looking for it. I know because it stops and it paces back and forth in the shadows across the grasses and it waits for me. I think it can’t leave the mangrove, I think it can’t come into the light. I actually believe that is what makes it go away. The light, I mean. I hope I’m right.
I shouldered my pack and the weight of my stolen flare gun settled against my lower back and made my stomach hurt with guilt and resolution. It was wrapped in three layers of plastic bag, but no tape. The gun was supposed to fire even if you were in the water, and the flare was supposed to burn even under the water. And I wasn’t taking any chances. I have just this one shot. I giggled at myself a little and covered my smiling teeth with my hand because mama says it isn’t proper to smile like that.
I saw it at this time yesterday, and every day before this one. This storm is supposed to be passing. Last year it only got one girl on the whole island. This year so far there are three missing children and everyone is whispering about the Danger. It's now or never and I am not prepared to fail.
If I am right and the light banishes him, then next year the Danger will not be here to claim any more of our people. And Kaitali and Bok and all of the others it has killed will be avenged. I didn’t know I wouldn’t be here to see whether I had been successful yet, life has a way of going in just a straight line that way. I can look back and see it clearly but none of us can look forward.
I walked slowly. I no longer have Bok’s too-big sandals to keep me afloat on the sucking mud, and so instead I wore no shoes at all. Nothing but my shorts and long shirt and a light plastic poncho that keeps the wet running down from my long hair warm and wet against my skin. Today I was going to use my flare gun and precious stolen flare to finish that thing that has haunted me and so the wet wasn’t on my mind.
I don’t know how long I stood there just outside of the mangrove waiting. My stomach hurt and my hands were freezing so I stuffed them into my armpits and found no warmth there either. I stepped farther into the darkness, almost right to the exact place I had seen the Danger when it had taken my brother and his best friend.
I pulled my backpack off and knelt, carefully unwrapping the layers of plastic from first the gun, tucking all of the bags back into the bottom of my pack and then from the flare, also carefully stuffing the empty bags back down into my pack. I closed the pack and put it back on. Then I picked up the flare gun from the ground and I cracked it open, they always look broken when you snap them this way. I put the single giant round into the gaping maw and I thought of my brother vanishing into the perfect black of that thing’s mouth and I snapped the flare gun back together around the flare. I might have been smiling, I don't remember. I know I kept both hands on the gun and did not cover my mouth.
“Today,” I whispered into the darkness my eyes couldn’t pierce. And I thought I saw his eyes looking back
at me for just a second. “You die today. Can you feel it?” I started walking sideways, facing always in the
direction I could not run. The water wasn’t as high this year as the year the Danger took Bok and Kaitali,
and I could still hear it running too fast and too close to me. I turned back towards my left and I saw it.
I learned last year that if I pretended I couldn’t see it that it moved more freely around. It makes no noise, so seeing is very important. I think maybe it might have thought I could see it and was being more sneaky those first few years. Last year when I pretended I couldn’t see it I saw it a lot more. This year has been no different. So when I saw it shifting around out there looking for a better place to leap from I shifted and looked behind it, as if trying to see it in the darkness beyond. I kept a giant trunk between us and knew I was getting too close to the rushing water. I backed towards the imagined safety of the clearing and turned again, almost losing it before I saw it was crouching right between the trees I had been using as a shield between us.
Now or never, I thought and as I pretended to point the gun in a circle around me I stopped when I could see the yellow-green of the Danger’s eyes on mine and I pulled the trigger. I was so scared that I didn’t think. I am thankful for that now. In the moment my fear became a monster of its own and chided me for wasting my only shot.
I dropped the flare gun right there. Stolen and useless to me. A small pang of guilt poked me for it later. I could have returned it. They are expensive and the fisherman I took it from probably hadn’t replaced it yet. And right in the moment I just knew I didn’t want it in my hands.
If the Danger were make-believe that flare would go right through it and light the tree behind it, or a spot on the ground and I would be a thief and a fool and a dumb girl and all of the things my mother has called me. It was not a pretend monster. I knew it was not before I fired. And for my belief I got to see the yellow-green eyes flash suddenly almost sunshine yellow and then the Danger exploded. It never made a sound. I know it saw me seeing it before I fired and it knew that I had been seeing it all along.
The flare did make sounds. So many sounds that were so loud. First this hiss of firing it and then the loud explosion and it shot a parachute out back in my direction and scared me and I sat down hard on the squelching wet ground, then the angry foaming sound of the flare burning. Bright red and gold right in the middle of the darkest place under the Danger’s mouth. I stood and I started backing away. Slow, careful and still backing away.
I must have gotten turned around a little bit when I was pretending to be pointing the gun around in a circle. I could hear that I was backing towards the water suddenly and it scared me. I had to stop and listen and then correct my course. I turned back and saw the most amazing thing.
The light was swallowing the Danger whole from the inside out. Like a whirlpool in a pond it rippled out from the middle of the thing and the red gold fire of the flare was turning yellow gold at the edges and darkness swirled in as if trying to swallow it and instead was sucked down into the bright middle to become part of the light. Over and over in ripples that made me unable to look away. And it tried to step forward or maybe just was falling forward and the movement broke the visual spell and I ran. I turned and I ran hard like I've never run since. I didn’t stop running until I had reached the road and I didn't look back, I turned the direction of our little house and the big barn beside it and my skinny stick legs carried me to the end of our drive.
Then I stopped, panting, and half-bent over I walked backwards, eyes on the light I could see out in the mangrove. It glowed hot fiery pink from here. The yellow swallowed in the trees or always just a figment of my imagination. The pink glow was impossible, I know that now. The best flares today only last about three or four minutes at the best of times, and I had been running for longer than that. I might even have been standing there watching the weird whirlpool of light and dark for longer than that. And that pink glow lasted all night. I could see it from my little window on the side of the house. My mother could see it too. She sat out on our covered porch and she watched it while she sipped her tea and I supposedly slept.
And in the morning the rains were gone. Everything was bright and clear and the sun made the air hot and sticky with the moisture that would take weeks to come back to normal. And all of the bell flowers on our porch that my mother loves and takes such good care of perked up and lifted their leaves and their colors sang out in blue and purple and pink and their leaves almost glowed they were so green. Over the next few weeks the mangrove had a change as well. From the road you could see the start of the changes. Bright yellow and orange and red flowers started blossoming from all of the trees. And all the way to the water you could follow the path of those lovely flowers. They smelled of burned matches to me and I didn’t like them the way everyone else did. Everyone marveled.
If mother ever knew what happened she never said. She met a photographer from National Geographic that
summer when he came to photograph the strange new flowers in the mangrove. Mother never said
anything to me then, either. And she never asked me questions. At the end of the summer the photographer returned and mother told me
we were going to America to live in San Francisco in a place called California and that the photographer,
whose name is Jimmy would be my new father and that I had a step of a sister called Penny that I would
meet later.
And so before school started on the island I was an American with a step father named Jimmy
who still travels the world photographing the beautiful, miraculous and bizarre. My step of a sister Penny
is my best friend. She’ll never be Bok and she has been everything he never could have been to me almost
since the first day. Penny taught me that smiling with my teeth showing is beautiful and she bought my first
picture that I painted with all the colors of that first morning after the last long rain.
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