Overnight Rain

It was scary at first, but I’ve decided I like the Overnight Rain. The storms are so loud after dinner, clacking hard off the roof and pinging against the windows like a rubber band shot from the back row. The whole world gets jostled up and no one wants to talk about it or anything else, even though you couldn’t hear them anyways. By early morning it’s different though, there’s something nice about when it’s still dark but the noise has softened into little plinks, and it starts to form piles on the ground and fill in all the tiny spiderweb gaps in the cobblestone. I feel like a crab at the bottom of the ocean, drifting in the current as sand waves cover me up. I know that somewhere up through all the water is the sun, shimmery like a ghost, but I’m too sleepy to go there for now. In the morning, I’ll raise myself up on spindly legs and all those bits and pieces will just slide right off my hard shell and I’ll swim to the surface.

My teacher, Mrs. Tulia, says we call it Overnight Rain because that’s a “euphemism.” You can’t say that it rained lots and lots of teeth last night and that it will probably rain even more teeth tonight because that might be rude or maybe someone would feel bad because they have to pick up all those teeth today. It’s the same reason why people call going home before dark a “curfew,” because everyone already knows that it would hurt to get zinged in the head with a tooth and you don’t need to tell them that again.

I still like living on the island, but it was more fun last summer, before we all had to follow the curfew. My dad is the opposite. He doesn’t mind the curfew because he works from home anyways. After dinner, he turns on the weather, like he’s not sure if we’re going to get Overnight Rain even though you can already hear the rumble. My dad says the weatherman always has to smile, no matter what, that’s why he makes jokes about the teeth.

“Looks like a downpour tonight, we’ll have to grin and bear it” he chuckles.

Or, “Did you hear the one about the dentist that didn’t get home before curfew? Those teeth hurty!” Then he laughs his weatherman laugh and sometimes my dad does a weatherman laugh too.

After the weather, it’s games together or homework on my own, then showers and bedtime. Once he thinks I’m asleep, my dad goes back to the living room to watch TV again, but this time it’s documentaries about how the island is sinking into the ocean, a tiny bit more every year. The people on those shows dress like the weatherman, but they don’t sound like him. They have sad eyes and creepy music plays in the background while they talk about floods and rising seas. Sometimes my dad does a weatherman laugh anyways, like he doesn’t understand jokes very well. Mrs. Tulia says he does that because he has to be both my mom and my dad and that’s hard for boys. But I think he maybe just didn’t have time to learn much about being a mom before she left, so it’s kind of unfair now like when they make you take a “pre-assessment” at the beginning of the school year and you haven’t learned anything yet and you’re still thinking about the beach and playing video games.

There’s a picture of my mother in the living room; she has the same green eyes as me and the same long black hair that frays at the end no matter what you do. She looks happy, like maybe the person taking the picture made her really smile instead of picture smile. I can tell the picture was taken down at the waterfront, but everything is tinted dark like a storm was rolling in.

Sometimes I ask my dad about her, but he doesn’t say much, or the things he says are true of all mothers. After a little bit, we usually talk about his favorite subject instead.

“Dad, is it all the teeth making us sink?”

“What? Why do you think that? The teeth are a different problem.”

“Well, there’s so many, it must be really heavy. And after school there’s usually people scooping big bucketfuls out of the pond, like we need to get rid of them.”

“Maybe, but the important thing to understand is that we aren’t really getting any lower. The water is getting higher, just a few millimeters at a time, but it goes up every year. You can set your watch to it,” which is what he says when he really doesn’t want something to happen, but it does anyways.

He talks a long time about melting ice caps and personal responsibility and how the salt water can start to seep into the good water we drink. He’s looking at me, but I don’t think he sees me anymore, like if the Overnight Rain never stopped and our whole house got buried in teeth, he might not notice until he opened the front door and a thousand molars tumbled in.

“So, if the island is shrinking, why don’t we pile up all the extra teeth in the holes? We could press them together like mud pies.”

He shakes his head, not like saying no though, just to let me know he’s going to the other room now. You need to wait a couple of minutes when he does that because maybe he is going to get the big broom with the red bristles. If he brings back the broom, that means we are taking a walk to the cemetery so hurry up and make a snack because dinner is going to be late tonight.

Not very many people visit the cemetery, so there’s a lot more teeth there than other parts of the island. We usually only see one or two other people, scooting their brooms along to cut little pathways through all the teeth left behind, like ants in an ant farm. Last winter, they put up a new sign that says “Volunteers Appreciated” next to a little cement platform full of empty wicker baskets and sometimes three or four full baskets. The sign is painted with bright red letters, the color that sour cherry candies taste like, a color that’s not allowed to stay that color really. Soon it will look like the other sign with the peeling paint and rickety pole, warning people not to visit the graves on the west side of the cemetery because sometimes pieces of the cliff crumble off.

Thursdays are the busiest day of the week, even though we get to leave school early. We all run to the shore to look for the Tooth Ship and whoever sees the smokestacks chugging towards us first is the winner and gets to wear the bracelet for the whole week. Mrs. Tulia says not to call it the Tooth Ship but she won’t say why and everyone does anyways, even my dad.

“Think you can carry one more?” he asks, already handing me a wicker basket stuffed full of the teeth we picked out of the garden.

I don’t mind, I want to see the Tooth Ship up close. The teeth shift and clink against each other as we walk down the hill towards the beach, like pirates’ doubloons but quieter and not so shiny. More people open their doors and fences and garages and join the procession, carrying baskets. Some call out to friends and pretend that running into each other is a happy coincidence, like Thursdays are still just Thursdays. Not Dad though.

By the time the Overnight Rain starts, the Tooth Ship isn’t even a smudge anymore, floating way out somewhere over the horizon. The crew must not be able to see anything but blue water, no matter which way they look. Maybe the teeth know where they are going and the boat just listens.

I listen to the Overnight Rain, pitter-pattering out a secret message that you can only hear when the rest of the world is quiet. Some nights I can feel each tooth pushing the island down a little deeper when it thuds to the ground, a drumbeat you can’t escape from. But other nights the little zips against my window are friendly, or at least say that they want to be friendly but don’t quite know how. They twinkle and bounce along the gutters, playful and wanting to put you at ease, like a weatherman’s laugh or a bedtime story. Somewhere way out in the ocean that’s a little too deep, wherever the Tooth Ship goes to dump its cargo, and the teeth glide into the water in little sips and sighs, there’s a mother crab building a house on the ocean floor while her baby crabs sleep. She makes the walls out of good sturdy molars and uses a big front tooth for the door and decorates the tops with canines like minarets. In the morning, she shakes the little crabs awake, pointing up through the water at the sun with her claw.