Tomato Soup

The radio issued a crackled weather warning on the day I left the cabin. I had almost wished that it would be a good enough excuse to stay, but this time I had to go home. Home was where my childhood seeped from wallpaper and my ancestors paved the streets. Home was not the cabin, no matter how much I might wish it to be. 

My four wheel drive rumbled over rocks that water had smoothed over time. By then, the sky had begun to drool hen's feathers. They floated down tentatively, as if they didn't really wish to fall. 

I drove towards the highway when the beach began to arc away from the dusty road. The wide road opened up before me and I readied myself to join the steady dribble of cars in pursuit of someplace. As I took my place on the road, the gentle feather-rain became a torrent of empty tomato soup cans. Home brand.

'Classic,' I muttered to myself. I turned up my car radio, which only bolstered the cacophony all around me. The road carried me on its back between sunny fields, which the rain had covered in a sea of red cans, their shiny rims glimmering despite the cloud cover. 

The traffic thickened as I grew closer to the city. Cars that had taken shelter from the violent rain had rejoined the highway. The rain had since calmed to a smattering of odd buttons, which, although they made the road slippery, were less likely to damage vehicles. I didn't complain about any type of rain, usually. My car could handle it. 

I knew what the city held for me, yet I drove on. I had not been this far from the cabin in years. The city was a cauldron of misfortune. If you could not afford to leave, you probably could not afford to live there either. People trickled in and out like water in a midstream pool, but some lived and died without ever leaving. The cabin had been my father's escape from the city's pressure cooker heat and the grime of its unclean streets. The cabin was not for my mother, though. She was a woman of the city, despite her constant complaints. The city had never been kind to her, but the city was her soul. My father was different. As soon as he had died, in his wife's beloved city, the cabin had been passed on to me. I guess I was different too. 

This time, it was my mother who had died. Guilt ached in my chest as the buttons gave way to a flood of black coffee, a liquid at last. I had not seen my mother since I had permanently moved into the cabin. I hadn't even known that she was sick. I should count myself lucky she had even left me the house. For all the care I'd shown her in these past few years, it wouldn't have surprised me if she had found some distant relative or long forgotten friend to leave it to.  Perhaps she hadn't had time to change her mind. The pit in my chest grew. 

The traffic slowed to a bottleneck at the entrance to the city. My windscreen wipers sloshed through the dark liquid that snaked its way down the glass. Puddles of coffee steamed in gutters and flicked off of truck tires. I pulled into the street I grew up on. Hard, dried beans began to fall on the ground. The clattering on my car roof was a familiar sound.

My mother's driveway was empty. She had never owned a car. My wheels pulled onto the cracked cement to take their rightful place beside what was now my house.

The battered envelope had been floating around in my glove box for years. The key was shiny, new. I turned it over in my clammy fingers. It was still raining, but the heat of the city had already begun to seep into my car.

Once the dried beans had slowed to a trickle, I opened my door and hurried to the cover of the front porch. I couldn't tell what might fall next. I turned the key in the tarnished lock. The smell of dust and acid crashed into me as soon as I got the door open. Immediately, I was back at that table. My stomach rumbling. My feet itching. My mother's breath rotting.

I stepped inside. A dried kidney bean skittered off of my foot and bounced off of the skirting board. The stove was off but the old kettle was on it. I opened the lid and peered in at the dark liquid it contained. Black coffee for one. 

The table in the corner held an assortment of Mother's sewing things. Her ancient Singer machine. The biscuit tin that had not contained biscuits in all the time I had known it. I opened the tin, half hoping for anything other than what I knew would be there. The eternal sea of buttons lay in its coffin, not one button matching any other. An old nightgown harboured a thin layer of dust where it lay on the table waiting to be mended.

I walked through the living room. A small flatscreen television was perched on a coffee table on one wall, an intruder among the musty air and ancient carpet that characterized the rest of the room. Next to the armchair, a small table held a bowl with a lump of old bread inside it. Something red, which was dried and sticky, coated one side of the bowl. Despite the heat, I felt cold to my core. How much had been left unfinished?

The door to the backyard screeched as I stepped over the threshold. The sky had continued to hold its rain while I was in the house, and it held off still now. I could tell that Mother's beloved chickens had not survived as soon as I beheld their coop. Feathers were everywhere. An unrecognizable lump in the center of the run made me avert my gaze. Had they torn each other apart in their hunger? I preferred not to think about it. 

I heard a yowl from behind the pear tree and flicked my eyes to the tabby cat that stood there. It stared at me viciously. 

I wanted nothing to do with this place. This life that wasn't a life. The cat would fend for itself. It seemed it already had, by the state of the chickens. I returned to the back door and stepped back inside. 

As I walked through the house, I barely looked at anything around me. There was nothing else to look at. My mother had lived a simple life, and I wanted nothing of hers to remind me of her. 

Through the dim light, my eyes settled on something that sat on the kitchen sink. On impulse, I stepped towards it, and picked up the cylindrical object. An empty can of tomato soup. Something possessed me to hold onto the can as I walked back to the front door and locked it carefully behind me. I sat the can on the passenger seat and turned on my engine. 

I pulled away from the house without a backwards glance. I turned back onto the highway and the sky fell once again. This time, it was the best kind of rain: water.