It already had started raining when Rebekah opened her eyes Friday morning. Droplets hit the pane of the window by her bed with a gentle but persistent ting-ting-ting that sounded like the opening notes of a great symphony. She sat up, smoothing out her wrinkled pajamas as she did, and lifted the blinds.
The rain picked up a little, and soon the glass was spattered with tiny drops that were beginning to run down the window together in little streams. She touched her forehead against the glass, and gasped. It was surprisingly cool and her breath misted on the window.
In the kitchen the rain was forgotten momentarily amid the cozy smell of homemade pancakes, but the sizzle of bacon on the skillet soon brought it back. It sounded like rain hitting the pebbles in their rock garden, and as she listened Rebekah saw images of streams rushing down the street, of showers that fell from treetops, of ditches that filled and overflowed, and fields that splashed mud and water into the air as you ran through them.
She was at the door, tugging on her galoshes as soon as the last of the dishes were cleared.
“I’m not sure I want you going out in that,” her mother said. The rain was heavier than it had been all morning. Trees bent and shook their branches like a dog, and still it kept coming down.
“Mom.” The way Rebekah said it, it came in three syllables and sounded like a formal complaint. Her mother knew the tone at once. If the storm was too much, Rebekah would track mud into the house, but the alternative was a sullen morning of kicked toys, unread books and undrawn pictures. It would be a morning of joyously splashing around outside, or it could be a morning of misery for everyone.
“Just be careful,” her mother said. “It’s fosse grim weather.”
“Fossil what?”
“Fosse grim,” her mother said. She laughed self-consciously, and gave her long blond hair a toss. “It’s a silly superstition your great-grandmother used to have. She said fosse grim was a water spirit in Scandinavia. He would play his violin and draw people closer so he could drown them.”
“Mo-om,” Rebekah said. This time the rebuke was milder and held only two syllables. ‘I’m 10 years old. I’m not going to drown in the rain.”
“Hey, if you think I’m embarrassing you should ask your other mother about the superstitions she was raised with,” said Rebekah’s mother. The little girl put her rain hat on, and was out the door like a shot.
The rain did not lessen in the next thirty minutes, nor the thirty minutes after that. Worms crawled onto the sidewalk, and a confused groundhog emerged from a hole near the garden while Rebekah’s cat, Misterfelix, looked around with a look that said he would almost certainly call his congressman to file a complaint about the appalling conditions he was forced to live in, if only he knew what a congressman was and how to file a complaint with one.
Rebekah was tired of playing in the rain by now. Inside her jacket and her boots she was cold and soaked to the bone, and feeling tired, The puddles in her yard were deeper now, and it was no longer funny the way her feet sank into them and then came out with a loud squelching nose. The small stream at the bottom of the back yard had disappeared. In its place something much wider had appeared, and it was carrying sticks and branches, and toys that Rebekah knew belonged to children far up the street.
The very air seemed gray and heavy, and when Rebekah raised her head to look back at the house, water hit her face as though someone had dumped a bucket there. There was rain in her eyes and in her nose and in her ears, and as she coughed to get the rain out of her mouth, she fell forward in the mud. Her hands sank in with a horrible squelching noise, and it was all she could do to pull them back out.
The house was near. Her mothers were in it, and they would tae her out of these cold wet clothes and put her in warm dry ones. They would make her hot cocoa to drink, and they would laugh and tell her about fossil grims and other silly stories their mothers had told them, and they would all laugh as she drew pictures of these bogeymen, and they would wait out the storm inside, nice and dry.
The house was close by. She could already hear one of her mothers playing the violin to lead her home…
The Most Useless Blog in the World 