Buffalo Rain
by Kay Sexton
May is watching the rain. Back in Bedong, rain like this would signal the planting season; three days of rain meant the rice plants could be eased from their nursery beds into the fields.
Here rain means failure, lost profits, dreams drowning in the plink plonk cacophony of a British summer. Sighing, she goes round the beachfront café, collecting the plastic tubs from under the leaks.
Plud, plud, the rain says to her, as it hits the empty containers that once held vanilla, raspberry-ripple or toffee ice-cream. Plat, plat the noise it makes in half-full tubs, and pink, pink echoes wetly from the nearly full ones. It astonishes May that rain sounds foreign in England. English cats say miouw, not tchaw, dogs bark woof, instead of awf. Rain speaks a different language too, and brings disaster instead of life.
May looks back behind the counter where Doug stands gazing out to sea, sipping steadily on the coffee he thinks she doesn't know is laced with cheap brandy. When they met he was the Chief Purser of the Grey Rover - a strong man, a mariner. Look at him now, she thinks, shipwrecked by a bit of rain.
Although it's more than a bit; this is the third year that a promising August has been hit by bad weather. Their five year lease on this foolish round café — open on all sides for the throngs of holidaymakers that have never quite materialised — has swallowed most of their savings.
We're still young, thinks May, as she empties the rainwater onto the sodden concrete of Marine Parade and replaces the ice-cream tubs under the drips. Suddenly she remembers the rain in Malaysia, not with her memory but with her nose; the delicious smell of dust being smattered to the ground by the first fat chilly drops — the glory of it, sending runnels of mud down the streets for children to splash up the house walls. The rich pepperiness of baby rice stems steeping in rain.
She takes off her overall, her shoes and her watch and walks down the beach to the ocean. Doug watches, immobile.
As the waves lift her feet from the sea bed and the rain pocks the grey surface of the cold Atlantic, she remembers water buffalo, standing ecstatic in rivers, the rain dancing on their hot, black hides.
She waves to Doug. After a few seconds, tentatively, he waves back. Next year, she thinks, floating on her back with the rain dimpling her long black hair, next year I will be at home when it rains.
As well as writing for the UK's premier sustainability journal, Green Futures, Pushcart-nominated Kay Sexton is Fiction and Creative Nonfiction editor at Her Circle E-zine. Her current focus is "Green Thought in an Urban Shade" a collaboration with the painter Fion Gunn to explore and celebrate the parks and urban spaces of four cities in words and images. 'Green Thought' has been granted residencies and exhibitions in London, Dublin and Beijing. Kay blogs about writing fiction at http://writingneuroses.blogspot.com/ and has a regular column at www.moondance.org.