Tear

The sky was a cloud of brine raining down on your antique, wooden windowpane. The newscaster said the weather was due for a change but it hasn’t stopped gushing since. Last week your sister suddenly stopped by--umbrella and raincoat clad, for an unexpected visit. She worried about you being alone amidst the choleric rise in atmospheric pressure. She was truly fearful for your safety. It was something about how she tilted her head and the way, she cupped your hands, and gravely asked, “Are you okay?” The cascading words tingled your skin and made your legs writhe uncomfortably. You’ve always been a marionette doll in her ventriloquism presence--with her perfectly tugging at your heartstrings.

When you were children, you used to watch the rainfall and the thunderstorm together. Your parents were often gone, leaving the two of you, alone. You used to spend time telling stories under blankets--erupting in explosive fits of giggles. You used to stick out your tongues in unison, to taste the droplets of cloudbursts--and when you shared head colds from dashing in puddles, you took the same medicine and recovered cheek by jowl, hand-in-hand. The vision of bond was foggy at the moment--somber with longing. Now, the two of you only saw one another when someone died or was going to die soon. During these times, someone always ended up crying, and it almost always was you.

Now you stand, hunched over, watching the rheum droplets of the mourning storm--flood and mist your front lawn, with no godly empathy for your moribund garden. You worry about your thickets of wilting flowers, the prickly spine of your thorny rose bush, and how well your tristesse Japanese moss is doing. You hope and pray to all that is holy, they do not drown away. For you cannot take any more loss or inconvenience, in your pall of gray.

You look for something to wear but cannot find anything that isn’t damp or terribly tear-stained. You choke back a sob when you find an old blouse, torn and with missing buttons. In your mind's eye, a sharp knife cuts the fog of dark thoughts away. On the couch, you sniffle and bubble into used wet tissues and change the network to a drama-filled Spanish opera. The singer’s mouth is so big, you imagine falling down, safely affixing inside the walls of her esophagus. Your fingers hopelessly graze the prayer beads in your pocket. Something inside you stings with absolution--and for the moment, it is cathartic. Your crippled butterfly heart palpitates and flutters loudly.

Outside the earth is uprooted and is whipping in a relentless--God-like maelstrom.

You attempt to feel the glands in your war-torn eyelids--tracing the wormy veins and gaping pores in your visage. You detect a lacrimal bone so fragile, so intangible, and ostensibly feminine--throbbing without bound or refuge. You dig your fingernail into your skin and out through to the surface, drawing blood from one of your sunken tear ducts. You stare down in a trance as if nothing happened and cry pulpy, sanguine tears into a handkerchief.

Your eyes are red, inflamed, and swollen--slowly the pupillary distance between them, grows clandestinely and ominously closer. In the bathroom mirror, your reflection wobbles--shattering upon the look of impact. Your shoulders shudder without a brace of comfort. Your experience is a slow death--draining your spirit like a leaking balloon on the ceiling. You think of the daughter who no longer visits you and you regret not being more of a devoted milch mother and breastfeeding her quite a time, longer. You change and rinse your contact eye lenses--the ones prescribed for pathological criers and let the saline drops baptize your cheek and eyelids. You can’t breathe for one, distilling moment, and take note of what it feels like to die. You wink away the dew and your onion face wrinkles. You sneeze like an old woman and laugh at that. Your wispy but balding eyelashes twitch and flinch, leaving your body to respond with sporadic aches that blink accusatorily in morse code. 

You always get this way when it rains.

You decide to take a shower and become completely and visibly naked. Your jellyfish breasts sag like a mollusk animal with wrinkly skin. You suddenly feel like going for a swim and fill the bathtub to the brim of the porcelain edge. You wonder if it is high enough to drown in. Soon enough, the waterworks come. You take a big gulp and rinse yourself. Salt and lysozyme wash over your shriveled body. You use the towel, that is laying suicidally on the toilet seat and aptly wipe away the spilling peak of your sorrow. You remember how your mother never cried in front of you--how you saw her only once, bleating like an injured sheep after her good china broke. Your stoic, workaholic father never crinkled or lamented either--not even at his own father’s--your grandfather’s funeral. A maudlin howl echoes deep in the ragged caves of your throat and escapes through your dry, chapped lips. You get out of the clawfoot bathtub and put on a robe that feels like a lapin of fur, around your tired flesh and weary bones.

You listen to the creaking moans of the organ house you've called home for what seems like an eternity. You hear the plop of raindrops echoing--reverberating like the facsimile thunder beat on Indian war-drums. You place down sandbox pails and metal-tin buckets, where the leaking roof has faltered and diligently try to locate where other vestige water has collected--or has seeped through the house's cartilage. You stop for a second to boil chamomile tea. You gloomily watch the kettle cry steam. You drink the hot liquid, even though it burns your tongue and roof of your body-of-water mouth. Your uvula hangs on for dear life. You listen deeply to the rain falling and sway in lieu of walking.

You leave the television on and do not return to turn it off. You set your mug down and break the cul-de-sac hallway, barefoot. You return to the doleful gaze of the bedroom window. Staring out of the wooden square like it’s a broken picture frame, you breathe so heavily, you create a perceptible vapor--conjuring a wave of condensation. A lachrymal amalgam of tear-gas and eyewater assemble on the glacial surface of the looking glass. They look like translucent infantry soldiers, in battle, traveling on foot through a snowy plain of exile. On the steamy glass, there is no reflection but only an empty, swirling--soul-sucking typhoon of backscatter. 

You frown and touch nature’s mirror with your angular witch-bone fingers. The glass cracks and you step back in fright. There is an eerie splash of calm in the air--a palpable dread that you come to fear.

The rain wouldn’t crash in--would it?

The glass begins cracking more--one cracks--two!---it looks like a slash of varicose veins carrying blood to the heart. The storm tears more and more--and picks up malevolently, shapeshifting to look like the love-child of a tsunami and tornado. Shards of crystal rupture, precipitating down and puncturing your face, scalp, and lips. One, very sharp fragment surgically stabs through to your eyelid and pierces your skull with precision. You cry out for help--the last drop of your tears falling with a kamikaze warble. 

A surf wave of muddy water gushes in through the crushed window--like blood from a wound's reopening. It rains indoors, flooding the lachrymose bedroom--soiling everything.

In the adjacent room, the television is still on. The box flickers on its own, navigating autonomously--blending and surfing between channels. Intermittently, it blares with the chatter of white noise. And then eerily, it stops.

The weather channel announces a sparkly update. A robotic weatherwoman, dressed head-to-toe in an austere navy blue--with a broad smile that creeps like paint splatter across her face, says: “Stay tuned for clear skies all next week. At last, there will be no more spilled tears.”