Grace+Chen+2014

A Study of the Rain- 1/2/14 When the rain comes it comes viciously. It slices through the air and breaks on the glass windows of the boarded up town, which has curled up into winter hibernation. The rain smothers the air into a semblance of silence, the soft beating of droplets against sidewalk thunderously drowning out all else. The general store, usually a hub of activity for the bustling village, forms a rather desolate oasis. The clerk slouches behind the counter, fiddling with his unpinned nametag and peering out at the clouds. He’s thinking about the drive home, a quarter mile down the street to the warm shelter of his bedroom and the casserole that’s surely being kept warm in the oven by his mother. He is a pimply high school graduate (or almost a college student, as he prefers to say) and is mentally already strutting around the sunny campus instead of watching the clouds writhe in his suffocating hometown. He flicks the safety pin against the metal counter and disinterestedly watches the nametag skid onto the floor. Should he pick it up? It can wait, he decides, and turns to check the clock again. There are only two customers, anyway, perhaps he can leave his shift early. The lone figure seated at the rusty metal table by the vending machines is hunched over his drink. The coffee has cooled over the last hour as he sits in his stern chair, pondering, but he hardly notices. He is trying to pick up his last thread of thought, to catch on to a coherent sentence in his mind, but the endless rattling of the window rattles his thoughts. A girl, something about a girl. The man turns the styrofoam cup in his hands, marking the side with a pattern of semicircles with his neatly groomed nails. The rain shows no sign of stopping its static and the only thing his weary mind can grasp on to is shaping the modern art on the white styrofoam. A forlorn chuckle almost escapes his throat before he catches it inside him. He sips at the coffee, swallowing the cold liquid and the grit of undissolved sugar. A girl, something about a girl.  The clerk is still sitting on his tall wooden stool at the counter, watching the storm. The rain wouldn’t last the night, he decides, and felt rather proud of this conclusion. He wishes the man at the table would speak, so he could tell the customer of his assured decisiveness. Instead, the clerk just nods his head significantly and listens to the shivering window pane. Hadn’t there been another customer? He implores the dismal clock’s hands to spin, implores the earth to revolve, just a little bit faster.  The other customer has been standing in front of the canned goods for so long she has almost forgotten what she is looking for. Canned cranberries, she reminds herself, and checks her wrinkled grocery list to confirm. Canned cranberries for her special Christmas tarts. She has forgotten a lot of things over the years, but the recipe for those cranberry tarts has stuck with her, unchanged and permanent. The rain trickling down the windows suddenly takes the semblance of tears. She hesitates in the aisle, blinking eyes half-dazzled by the array of color and labels that adorn the shelves. A certain shade of winking blue stands out to her, and the can is plucked from the sea of cranberry options. What else did she need? The trustworthy grocery list is consulted again painstakingly; the last item on the list is paint. She remembers now, in fact, she had been in this store just last week for some touch up paint. The customer makes her way through the maze to the front desk, waiting a moment for the clerk’s narrow eyes to return from some distant vista and focus on her. She disapprovingly notes the nametag discarded on the floor. She catches a sight of her visage in the dusty glass mirror hanging above the counter. “The touch-up paint doesn’t quite match.”